James Richardson.
James Richardson, Founder, Optimising.
Most agencies in Australia have added AI search or GEO to their services pages over the past six months. I don't think most of them changed how they actually work.
The honest test is a simple one. Ask your agency to show you where your brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini today, and how that's moved over the last quarter. Not a strategy deck. Screenshots and data. If what comes back is a roadmap and a promise, I think you have your answer, and I say that as someone who runs an agency and knows how tempting it is to sell the category before you've built the capability. That test is a starting point, though. It tells you whether your agency is paying attention at all. It doesn't tell you whether any of it matters.
Most of the industry has settled on prompt tracking as the proof point. I don't think it's wrong, but I don't think it's enough either. You can track 500 prompts across four models and still not know whether any of it matters commercially. Showing up in ChatGPT when someone searches "best project management tools" is only useful if that's a query your buyers are actually running, and if your visibility there is translating into something downstream: branded search, direct traffic, pipeline. A prompt dashboard shows you the easiest thing to measure. That's usually not the thing that matters most.
Attribution is the harder conversation, and I think most of us are getting it wrong by trying to fit AI search into a last-click model that was never going to hold it. Here's how I watch people search now, including myself: question into ChatGPT, three brands come back, you Google whichever one stuck, click through to the site, convert. The AI platform shaped the decision. GA4 records it as "direct" or "branded organic." The platform that did the work gets none of the credit.
Better tracking won't fix that. What I've found useful is watching the signals move together. When a client's AI visibility improves, I'd expect branded search, direct traffic and assisted conversions to lift in the same window. If three of those four tick up over a quarter, that's a pattern worth taking seriously. The debate about which touchpoint deserves the credit feels, to me, like the wrong fight.
On the bigger question, whether SEO is dead, whether GEO is real, I've landed somewhere in the middle, and I think the middle is where the work is. LLMs pull from live search indexes. Every URL ChatGPT cites got there by crawl, index, rank. That's the same foundation you were supposed to be building for SEO, and if you were building it properly, you've already built a significant portion of what AI platforms reward.
The surfaces have changed, though. How models select, weight and present information is genuinely different from how Google ranks a results page. Structured content, citable sources, clear entity definitions: these matter more than they did. What I find harder to accept is agencies that weren't doing the foundational work well before now selling it back to clients with a new acronym on top. That isn't a new capability. It's a price rise with better marketing.
If I were sitting across from my agency at the next review, these are the four questions I'd ask:
- Can you show me which AI platforms are driving branded search or direct traffic to our site, and how that's changed over the last quarter?
- What's happened to our branded search volume and direct traffic in the same window?
- What's the evidence the two are connected, for us, or for any client you work with?
- Can you show me one account where AI visibility, branded search, direct traffic and pipeline moved together last quarter?
If they can answer all four with data, I'd hold onto them. If the answer is a roadmap, I think you already know.
I don't want this to become the next blockchain-for-marketing cycle. Lots of services pages, lots of certifications, very little evidence anyone moved a commercial number. I don't think it has to go that way. The measurement is available. The traffic signals are in GA4 already. The commercial connection is there for anyone willing to pull the four charts up side by side. But that requires doing the work rather than selling the category.
Every agency will say they do AI search. What I'd ask is whether they can prove it.