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Traditional search still matters: titles, page speed, content people actually read. The shift is in how more buyers now start. Instead of scanning a list of blue links, they ask an assistant like ChatGPT or Perplexity for "a reliable accountant in Parramatta" or "emergency plumber in Geelong tonight" and read the synthesised answer. If your business is not cited in the sources those models trust, you are invisible at the moment of intent.

This is the discipline now being called generative engine optimisation, or GEO. It overlaps with traditional SEO but is not the same thing. Search engines reward what ranks; generative engines reward what they can confidently cite. The signals are different, the testing methodology is different, and the fixes often live in different parts of your site.

How we measure it

We run real category and location queries against your domain and a short list of comparable competitors, then score how often your business appears, how it is described, and how it compares. A low AI visibility score does not mean you are missing from every model. It means you are underrepresented in the answers that drive enquiries in your category, in your area. Sites we monitor through XRAYAI see this score shift week by week as competitors publish, get cited elsewhere, or restructure their pages, which is why a point-in-time check is less useful than tracking the trend.

The fastest improvements are almost always about clarity, not technical tricks. A Coogee café whose homepage opens with "specialty coffee and brunch in Coogee, open 7am to 3pm daily" gives an AI assistant something concrete to cite. "Boutique hospitality experience in eastern Sydney" does not.

A quick self-check before you brief anyone:

• Is your trading name, address, and phone number identical on your website, Google Business Profile, and major directories?
• Do your service pages name the suburbs you cover, or hide behind phrases like "greater region"?
• Can a stranger read your homepage in ten seconds and explain what you sell and to whom?

Get those right and you will usually move the score before anyone touches a line of code. Beyond the basics, GEO gets technical fast: schema structure, entity consistency across the web, the specific phrasing models pick up as a citable claim. That is where most owners benefit from bringing in a specialist rather than guessing at what worked in a blog post from last year.