Getting found in the age of AI search

For years, the rules of online visibility were relatively straightforward. If you wanted customers to find your business, you focused on SEO. You improved your rankings, increased traffic to your website and, hopefully, converted that traffic into growth.

Those principles still matter, but the way people search for information is changing rapidly.

Increasingly, users are turning to tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI Overviews for answers. Rather than scrolling through pages of search results, they are often presented with a single response that brings together information from multiple sources. For businesses, that creates a new challenge. If your brand is not referenced in those answers, it may not matter how highly you rank in traditional search results.

To help our portfolio companies get to grips with this, we hosted a Scale-up Academy session in June with Panos Savopoulos, CEO, and Matt Ford, Head of Product at Lumar, a Beringea UK portfolio company specialising in website optimisation for AI search visibility. Harry Thomas, Partner and Head of Portfolio at Beringea, has shared the key takeaways below for founders thinking about how their brand shows up in an AI-first world.

New acronyms to learn: GEO, AEO, and ACO

One of the biggest shifts is that ranking highly is no longer the sole objective. The emerging discipline of Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, focuses on increasing the likelihood that AI platforms will mention your business when responding to relevant queries.

Alongside this sits Answer Engine Optimisation, often referred to as AEO, which aims to position your content as the answer itself rather than simply one of the sources used to generate a response.

We are also seeing organisations focus on how their content and products are accessed by agents seeking to purchase on behalf of users - a discipline that is increasingly known as Agentic Commerce Optimisation.

Together, they represent a natural extension of SEO rather than a replacement for it. GEO helps ensure your brand is included in AI-generated answers, while AEO increases the chances that your content becomes a trusted source behind those answers, and ACO ensures that your website architecture is easily navigated by agents tasked with sourcing a recommended product.

Making your business visible to AI

Before thinking about content, businesses need to make sure AI systems can actually access and understand what is already on their websites.

Much like traditional search engines, AI platforms rely on crawlers to discover information. Technical issues such as blocked pages or inaccessible content can make it difficult for AI systems to understand what a business does, regardless of how strong the content may be.

Once those foundations are in place, attention turns to the content itself. According to Lumar, content that performs well in AI search tends to answer questions clearly and directly, explore topics in sufficient depth to demonstrate expertise, offer something distinctive rather than repeating what already exists elsewhere online, and address genuine customer questions and needs.

Your website is only part of the picture

Another important difference from traditional SEO is that AI systems look far beyond your own website. Reviews, media coverage, third-party articles and broader online discussions all contribute to how a business is represented in AI-generated responses.

As a result, visibility increasingly depends on a company's overall digital presence rather than the performance of a single website. For many businesses, this means marketing, content and PR teams need to work closely together.

The way success is measured is evolving too. Keyword rankings and click-through rates still have value, but they no longer tell the full story. Businesses are starting to pay closer attention to how frequently they appear in AI-generated responses, which pages are being cited and how their visibility compares with competitors.

Why founders should pay attention now

The encouraging message for founders is that this remains a relatively open opportunity. Traditional search eventually became dominated by established players with years of accumulated authority. AI search is still in its early stages, creating opportunities for businesses that act now to establish visibility before the landscape becomes more crowded.

For founders, the first step is simply understanding where their business stands today. Knowing how your brand appears in AI-generated responses, identifying any technical barriers and assessing whether your content provides genuinely useful answers will help ensure that future marketing efforts are focused in the right places.