How to get discovered in AI search

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place.

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Daniel Whitenack (0:41)

Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI podcast. This is Daniel Whitenack. I am CEO at Prediction Guard, and I'm joined as always by my co-host, Chris Benson, who is a principal AI and autonomy research engineer. How are you doing, Chris?

Chris Benson (0:56)

Doing great today, Daniel. How's it going?

Daniel Whitenack (1:00)

It's going great. It's good to see you. You're visible to me.

And that's an interesting part of the topic today. An awkward segue into how do things become visible to us on the internet these days, which seems to be increasingly through AI platforms, AI chat interfaces, answer engines, whatever you call them. And today we're privileged to have with us Liam Dunne and Ben Moore, who are co-founders at Discovered Labs, to talk through some of these things. Welcome, Liam and Ben. Great to have you.

Liam Dunne (1:38)

Good to be here. Thank you. Likewise. Thanks.

Daniel Whitenack (1:41)

Well, for those that maybe are less familiar with this topic in general around AEO, GEO, answer engine optimization, AI visibility, whatever term is around this, and maybe there are differences between those terms. But for those that aren't as familiar, could you all give us a context for what those things mean, and then also how you're involved in those topics day-to-day, what you're doing at Discovered Labs, which is the context that you're doing some of the work that we'll talk about.

Liam Dunne (2:17)

Cool.

I would say, and everyone's got a different opinion on this, so feel free to take mine with a pinch of salt. So I would say AI Search is like the broad category. And then within that, you'd have answer engine optimization. Some people say, which is AEO, some people say GEO, generative engine optimization. I view those as the same thing, and I just call it AEO. Honestly, for a very simple reason, there are a lot of venture-funded companies that have spent a lot of money on that term.

And so I'm just gonna fly behind them and lean into it.

The background of us, so how are we involved with this? So we're co-founders at Discovered Labs. It's an organic search agency. So we provide end-to-end services. Now organic search for us splits into two buckets. You've got like traditional SEO and you have AI search. So traditional SEO, we want our clients to be at the top of Google whenever people are searching related keywords. AI search, we want our clients to be appearing inside LLMs in a way that they want to be. So we view that as the AI search side of things.

Daniel Whitenack (3:30)

Gotcha. I guess maybe for context, people might be familiar with SEO search engine optimization.

Maybe help orient us, is SEO, is that still a thing? Is this topic basically replacing that? Is it kind of, how do the two interact? I mean, this is always, I guess this is always a fluid thing, but if I'm a company, this, you know, I'm a company in 2026 Like what is most important and how are people thinking about the effort they're putting into maybe traditional SEO versus these topics? Do you have any thoughts there?

Liam Dunne (4:16)

I do. Feel free to, but I can waffle too much, so feel free to ask me questions. I'll go deeper, but ultimately, you won't hear me say that SEO is dead. It's not an opinion I hold. I just think that the space has grown.

We're doing the same three jobs that's on-page. So looking after your owned website, we're doing off-page, which is building brand authority and we're doing technical, which is making sure agents and Google systems can access your website and understand information. It's the same three jobs. For me, it comes down to a matter of tactical priorities. I think this is where people get lost. I do think there are some things, depending on what the goal is, to rank number one on Google for a commercial keyword, you're probably going to use different tactics than if you were to optimize for a surface area like ChatGBT. Again, you're going to be doing the same jobs, you're going to be creating content, you're going to be building the brand of your company, you're going to be optimizing for technical SEO, but the tactical priorities is where it changes. Like for example, what does good content actually mean from a perspective of Google versus ChatGBT? So ultimately, SEO is still a thing. It's now expanded. We now have AEO, those together, I call organic search.