SEO service
AI SEO Agency: Getting Cited in AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity
The answer now sits above the links, and for a decent share of searches the click never happens.
That is what most people are hiring an AI SEO agency to fix, usually after watching impressions hold steady in Search Console while clicks slid for three months. Or after someone asked whether the business shows up in ChatGPT and nobody knew.
This page is deliberately unexciting. The category is full of claims nobody can verify, so here's what's known, what's testable, and what's noise.
- $990
- Entry price, published in full
- 30 days
- Notice to leave. No lock-in
- 1pm to 6pm
- AEST, senior-led, contactable
The three surfaces, and why one doesn't imply the others
People say "AI search" as if it's one thing. It's at least three, sourced differently.
| Surface | Where it pulls from | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| AI Overviews and AI Mode | Google's index, weighted to pages already ranking | Top ten or mostly invisible |
| ChatGPT with browsing | Bing-derived index, live fetches, training data | Bing rankings and brand mentions count |
| Perplexity | Own crawl and live retrieval, favouring recent factual pages | Reference pages do well |
Run the same questions across all three and the overlap in cited sources is often under half. A page quoted word for word in an AI Overview can be missing from ChatGPT's answer to the same question. One lever for all three is a guess.
What actually gets cited
This part is observable. Run the questions, see what gets pulled, note the patterns.
The answer arrives in the first two sentences
Not after a paragraph of context.
Headings that match the question
"How much does NDIS plan management cost?" beats "Pricing Considerations".
Tables and structured comparisons
Easy to extract, easy to attribute.
Defined terms
A clean one-sentence definition gets lifted constantly.
Original numbers
Your own job averages or survey. Nobody else has them, so you get named.
Strong conventional rankings
Retrieval leans hard on the existing index.
That last one matters most. A page that isn't ranking usually isn't in the pool to be cited at all. Classic SEO is the foundation under every AI visibility result we've seen, and anyone calling it dead is selling the replacement.
Month by month
What the first year usually looks like, and when you can leave
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- Technical and local foundations
- Google Business Profile movement
- Organic rankings
- Compounding
- You can leave
Month 1
Setup-heavy. Crawl issues, tracking, the Google Business Profile, and the pages that earn money first. We do not dress month one up as results.
Typical timing, not a guarantee. Thirty days notice applies in any month, with no exit fee and no clawback.
Entity work: being something the model recognises
Language models answer in names, so getting named means being a recognisable entity rather than a URL.
In practice: one business name everywhere, an About page saying plainly what you do and where, Organization and Person schema matching the visible text, a named author with a real bio, and mentions on sites you don't own.
Businesses with scattered NAP data, stock-photo team pages and no third-party mentions almost never get named, even when the content is good.
Compare the models
What you are actually buying, laid side by side
Three ways people have bought SEO before they ring us, and the way we sell it.
SERPDrive
$990, $1,990 or $3,490 a month
- Who does the work
- The senior who scoped it. No account manager, no junior handover, contactable 1pm to 6pm AEST.
- What the report shows
- The deliverables listed for your tier, every month, with the work shown and an honest read of the numbers when they are not moving.
- When it goes wrong
- At the three month mark we go through the data honestly. If the volume in your niche is too thin, we say so rather than roll you into another quarter.
- The contract
- None. Thirty days notice in writing, any month, no exit fee and no clawback. You keep everything.
How to write a paragraph that gets quoted
Most pages bury the answer. Here's a real rewrite from a Melbourne conveyancing client.
Before:
At our firm, we understand that buying property can be stressful, and many clients come to us with questions about the costs involved. Every matter is different and a number of factors influence the figure.
That answers nothing. It was never cited, for any query, on any surface.
After:
Conveyancing in Victoria typically costs $800 to $1,400 in professional fees for a standard residential purchase, plus $1,200 to $1,800 in disbursements (title searches, council and water certificates, the land transfer fee). A $700,000 purchase in Frankston came to $2,430 all up in 2025.
Same page, same firm. Within six weeks it was quoted in AI Overviews for cost queries and in ChatGPT answers on Victorian conveyancing fees.
The mechanics are simple enough to copy yourself. Lead with the number. Put the qualifier second. Name a real place and a real figure. Give a range instead of "it depends". Keep it under sixty words so it can be lifted whole. Do that to your twenty highest-intent pages and you've done more than most AI SEO services manage in a quarter.
What an AI SEO agency can honestly measure
What we can measure and report monthly:
- Citation share across a fixed set of 30 to 50 customer questions, run monthly across all three surfaces.
- Branded search volume, which lifts when you're named even where no click happens.
- Referral sessions from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai in GA4. Small numbers, high intent.
- Impressions versus clicks in Search Console, query by query. Flat impressions with falling clicks is the signature of an answer above you.
What we can't measure reliably:
- AI Overview impressions. Google doesn't break them out, so a precise number is modelled, not measured.
- ChatGPT citation share at scale. Answers vary by user, session, memory and region, so a sample gives a direction, not a percentage.
- Attribution from a cited answer to a sale. The click often doesn't exist, so there's no path to follow. We use branded search and enquiries as proxies and label them as such.
What we won't sell you
No guaranteed ChatGPT or AI Overview ranking. Nobody controls those outputs and they shift between sessions, so a guarantee is a lie with an invoice attached.
No AI-generated content at volume. It performs worse in our own testing, and the sites publishing it in bulk have taken the heaviest hits in two years of core updates. We use AI for research and outlining, then a person writes the page.
No paid "LLM submission" services. There is no submission queue, so the people selling access to one are selling nothing.
Who should be paying for this yet
Not everyone, honestly.
If you're a plumber in Blacktown or a sparky in Frankston, your money belongs in the map pack and your reviews. Somebody with a burst pipe taps the three-pack, they don't consult Perplexity. We'll tell you it's a distant third.
If you're B2B SaaS, an accounting or law firm, a financial adviser, an NDIS provider or a health service, it already matters. Those buyers research for weeks and ask ChatGPT for a shortlist. If three competitors get named and you don't, you're out before the first call. Rough test: if your customer takes more than a fortnight to decide, fund it now.
What this costs
AI search visibility work sits in the Authority plan at $3,490 a month, alongside 8 articles, 8 links, digital PR and 150 keywords tracked.
It isn't in Local ($990) or Growth ($1,990) for a plain reason. Citation work only pays off on top of solid rankings, entity signals built through digital PR, and enough content to cover a real question set. Bolting a module onto a $990 plan means charging for something that can't work yet. Full numbers sit on our SEO pricing page.
Run the sum
How many enquiries a month each tier has to bring in
The only sum that matters, and it changes completely with what you sell. Move these to your own numbers.
Each enquiry is worth about $420 at that rate. That is revenue, not margin, so apply your own margin.
Local
$990 a month · One service area
3 enquiries a month to break even
GrowthMost common
$1,990 a month · Multi-suburb or service
5 enquiries a month to break even
Authority
$3,490 a month · Competitive metro
9 enquiries a month to break even
Fees are the published monthly prices, in Australian dollars, ex GST. If the number for Authority is not realistic for your business, Authority is the wrong buy, and we will say so.
Questions
Questions we get asked
Straight answers, including the uncomfortable ones. Anything else goes to the person who does the work.
Ask your own questionIs SEO dead?
No, and the evidence points the other way. AI answers are assembled from pages that already rank, so the work that gets you ranking is what gets you cited. What died is thin content that ranked on keyword matching alone.
Can you guarantee we appear in AI Overviews?
No. Overviews don't fire for every query, they change week to week, and nobody outside Google controls source selection. We commit to inputs: pages restructured to answer directly, entity and schema work, citation tracking so you see movement. Anyone guaranteeing the output is lying.
Should we block AI crawlers?
For most businesses, no. Blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot removes you from live retrieval, which is where you want to be visible. The real case is when your content is the product, a paid database or a proprietary dataset. Then block training crawlers and allow retrieval ones. We'll go through your robots.txt.
Does this replace normal SEO?
It's a layer on top. Technical health, content quality, internal linking and links still do the heavy lifting. Around 80 percent of our AI visibility work improves conventional rankings too. The rest is answer formatting, entity consistency and tracking.
How do we know it's working?
Your monthly report shows citation share on the tracked question set, branded search volume, AI referral sessions and the impressions-to-clicks pattern per query. First movement usually shows in 8 to 12 weeks. We also list questions where a competitor still gets cited instead of you.
Is AI-written content a problem?
Published at volume without editing, yes. We've audited sites that added 400 generated articles and lost more than half their traffic in the next core update. Google says it judges quality, not the tool, but unedited output is low quality, so that won't save you.
Free, by hand, no obligation
Start with an AI visibility check
Four fields: website, main competitor, service area, email. Within two business days a person sends back a manual mini-audit, not a generated PDF.
Enquire through this page and we'll add the AI visibility check: twenty questions a customer might ask before buying from you, run across AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity. You'll see who gets cited and where your gap is.
Three genuine findings, one fix you can do yourself without paying us, one thing that needs help. No sales call unless you want one, and no lock-in if you go ahead.
- Turnaround
- Two business days
- Follow-up
- No sales call unless you ask
What clients say
In their own words
Upwork reviews, reproduced unedited apart from the spelling of Arbaz’s name.
Working with Arbaz has been an absolute pleasure. His expertise in managing our off-page strategy is evident in the tangible results and increased visibility we've achieved. Arbaz is professional, diligent, and consistently goes above and beyond our expectations. He not only understands our goals but also offers insights that add tremendous value to our strategy. I appreciate his proactive approach and clear communication. We feel fortunate to have him as a part of our team and I highly recommend him to anyone looking for top-tier off-page strategy services.
Arbaz was incredibly helpful and dependable. His expertise in SEO is evident, and he did an outstanding job restoring many of our websites. I highly recommend working with him.
Great service, great communicator, patient, kind, helpful, and knowledgeable. Arbaz delivered a solid report that listed all the issues we face with our site, and answered all our questions. Happy!
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