# What Is AI SEO? Definition and How It Applies in Perth > AI SEO defined: making a business reachable, identifiable, retrievable and citable by AI-assisted search such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity. Source: https://aiseoperth.net.au/what-is-ai-seo/ --- Reference # What is AI SEO? Author Dorian Menard, founder of Search Scope Published 9 September 2026 Reading time 7 min AI SEO is the practice of making a business visible to AI-assisted search: systems such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity that retrieve sources and compose an answer rather than listing links. It covers whether those systems can reach a site, identify the business, retrieve the right passage and cite or recommend it. In Perth, Western Australia, that means being one of the sources an assistant draws on when someone asks a Perth question. ## Key facts Key facts about AI SEO Fact Detail Evidence What it optimises for Being reached, identified, retrieved and cited by AI-assisted search systems, not a ranking position. INFERRED Relationship to SEO Google states that existing SEO best practices remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode and that no additional requirements or special optimisations apply. DOCUMENTED Eligibility on Google A page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. DOCUMENTED Crawler access OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic each publish separate user agents for search retrieval and for training, controlled independently in robots.txt. DOCUMENTED Guarantees No platform documents a way to guarantee inclusion, citation or recommendation. Any such promise is unsupported. DOCUMENTED Related terms Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) overlap with AI SEO and are defined separately on this site. DOCUMENTED ## What AI SEO covers AI SEO is a practice, not a platform feature. It groups the work that affects whether an AI-assisted search system can use a business as a source. Four questions define the scope, and they sit in dependency order. 1. **Can the system reach the site?** Retrieval crawlers and user-triggered fetchers have to be allowed through robots.txt, firewalls and bot management, and the page has to contain its content in HTML rather than only after JavaScript runs. 2. **Can the system identify the business?** One name, one address form, one description, and agreement between the site, registries, directories and profiles. This is the subject of [entity SEO](https://aiseoperth.net.au/entity-seo/). 3. **Can the system retrieve the right passage?** Answers are composed from passages, so a page that states its answer plainly and near the top is easier to use than one that buries it. 4. **Is there a reason to cite or recommend this source over another?** Corroboration from independent sources, original material that does not exist elsewhere, and coverage of the comparison and decision questions people ask assistants. DOCUMENTED Google’s own guidance for site owners lists the same foundations for its AI features: crawling allowed in robots.txt and by any CDN, content findable through internal links, important content available as text, structured data that matches the visible text, and up-to-date Business Profile information. It adds that no new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema.org markup are needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. ## What AI SEO is not DOCUMENTED It is not a way to make a system name a business. Google states that meeting every requirement and best practice does not guarantee a page will be crawled, indexed or served. No other platform documents a guarantee either. A vendor promising a citation, a mention or a place in a shortlist is promising something no platform offers. DOCUMENTED It is not a separate discipline from SEO on Google’s surfaces. Google’s page for site owners opens by saying that best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features and that there are no additional requirements. The [AI SEO vs SEO](https://aiseoperth.net.au/ai-seo-vs-seo/) reference goes through what carries over and what is new. It is not prompt injection, hidden instructions to models, or keyword stuffing aimed at assistants. None of the platforms document any mechanism by which text addressed to a model changes its source selection, and this publication treats such tactics as unsupported. ## Why the term exists TESTED The behaviour that made the practice necessary is measurable. [Pew Research Center’s analysis](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/) of browsing data from 900 US adults found that 18% of Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary, that users who saw a summary clicked a traditional result link in 8% of visits compared with 15% when no summary appeared, and that users clicked a link inside the summary in 1% of visits. Those are US figures; no equivalent Australian panel study is known to this publication. TESTED The research vocabulary came first. The term Generative Engine Optimisation was introduced in a 2023 paper by Aggarwal and colleagues, who defined a generative engine as a search system that composes answers with a large language model and measured how content changes altered visibility in those answers. AI SEO is the broader market term that grew around the same idea; [the GEO reference](https://aiseoperth.net.au/generative-engine-optimisation/) covers the paper and its limits. ## How the platforms document their side The platforms do not publish ranking factors for their AI surfaces. What they publish is access controls and eligibility rules, which is the part of AI SEO that can be stated as fact. Platform Retrieval or search agent Training agent Documented eligibility rule Google (AI Overviews, AI Mode) Googlebot Google-Extended controls Gemini training and grounding, not Search Page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet ChatGPT OAI-SearchBot (search index), ChatGPT-User (user-triggered fetch) GPTBot Sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers Perplexity PerplexityBot (search index), Perplexity-User (user-triggered fetch) Not used for foundation model training per Perplexity Allow PerplexityBot to appear in results Claude Claude-SearchBot (search index), Claude-User (user-triggered fetch) ClaudeBot Disabling Claude-SearchBot prevents indexing for search DOCUMENTED Each of these is taken from the platform’s own crawler documentation, read on 9 September 2026 and linked in the sources. Everything beyond access and eligibility, including which sources a system prefers and why, is either observed behaviour or inference, and is labelled that way wherever this site discusses it. ## How AI SEO applies in Perth A Perth business asking “does this apply to me” is really asking whether people in Perth use these systems for the questions that lead to it. That is a measurement question, and it is the reason this publication runs an [observation programme](https://aiseoperth.net.au/research/) rather than restating national claims. What can be said now: - DOCUMENTED Google lists Australia among the countries where AI Overviews are available, and Google Australia announced AI Mode’s rollout in Australia in English on 8 October 2025. Both surfaces are live for Perth searches. - DOCUMENTED Google reports traffic from AI features inside the normal Search Console Performance report under the Web search type, so a Perth site’s AI Overview and AI Mode clicks are already counted in the figures it sees, not separated out. - HYPOTHESIS Perth recommendation prompts may be answered from national sources, directories and review platforms more often than from Perth business sites. That is the first question the [most cited domains study](https://aiseoperth.net.au/research/) is designed to answer, and it is not asserted here. The practical Perth checks are the same as anywhere: whether the retrieval agents above are allowed through, whether the business resolves to one entity across ABN Lookup, its Google Business Profile, directories and its own site, and whether its pages answer the questions Perth buyers actually ask. The [guides](https://aiseoperth.net.au/guides/) cover each check. ## What is documented and what is inferred - **Documented:** access controls per platform; Google’s eligibility rule; Google’s statement that no special markup is required; availability of AI Overviews and AI Mode in Australia; the Pew click figures for the US. - **Tested:** the GEO paper’s finding that content changes altered visibility in its benchmark, with the paper’s own caveat that effects varied by domain. - **Inferred:** the four-question scope above is this publication’s synthesis of the documented foundations, not a platform’s statement. - **Not established:** any claim that a particular signal causes citation, any platform-wide ranking formula, and any Perth-specific frequency, until the observation programme publishes data. ## Related concepts - [ Reference Generative Engine Optimisation The research-origin term for optimising content for generative engines. ](https://aiseoperth.net.au/generative-engine-optimisation/) - [ Reference Answer Engine Optimisation Optimising for direct-answer surfaces. ](https://aiseoperth.net.au/answer-engine-optimisation/) - [ Reference AI search optimisation How AI-assisted search retrieves and cites sources. ](https://aiseoperth.net.au/ai-search-optimisation/) - [ Reference AI SEO vs SEO What carries over and what is new. ](https://aiseoperth.net.au/ai-seo-vs-seo/) - [ Reference Entity SEO Making a business identifiable as one entity. ](https://aiseoperth.net.au/entity-seo/) ## Related research - [ Planned study Perth AI Search Visibility Index Which Perth businesses AI systems name and recommend. ](https://aiseoperth.net.au/research/) ## Sources 1. [AI features and your website](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features), Google Search Central (read 9 September 2026) DOCUMENTED 2. [Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google's AI experiences on Search](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/05/succeeding-in-ai-search), Google Search Central Blog, 21 May 2025 (read 9 September 2026) DOCUMENTED 3. [Overview of OpenAI crawlers](https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots), OpenAI (read 9 September 2026) DOCUMENTED 4. [Perplexity crawlers](https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots), Perplexity (read 9 September 2026) DOCUMENTED 5. [Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?](https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler), Anthropic (read 9 September 2026) DOCUMENTED 6. [Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/), Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025 (read 9 September 2026) TESTED Browsing data from 900 US adults, March 2025. 7. [GEO: Generative Engine Optimization](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735), Aggarwal et al., arXiv (KDD 2024), November 2023, revised June 2024 (read 9 September 2026) TESTED On this page - [Definition](#definition) - [What AI SEO covers](#what-ai-seo-covers) - [What AI SEO is not](#what-ai-seo-is-not) - [Why the term exists](#why-the-term-exists) - [How the platforms document their side](#how-the-platforms-document-their-side) - [How AI SEO applies in Perth](#how-ai-seo-applies-in-perth) - [What is documented and what is inferred](#what-is-documented-and-what-is-inferred) - [Sources](#sources) Evidence labels Claims on this page are labelled DOCUMENTED, OBSERVED, TESTED, INFERRED or HYPOTHESIS. [What the labels mean](https://aiseoperth.net.au/methodology/#evidence-labels). Published by Search Scope AI SEO Perth is published by Search Scope, a Perth SEO consultancy founded by Dorian Menard. Search Scope provides commercial SEO and AI search optimisation services; this website is maintained as its specialist Perth AI search research and reference publication. [Search Scope](https://searchscope.com.au/)