AIO: How to help AI understand and trust your brand

For the third blog in our series on AI visibility, we’ll be discussing AIO (AI optimization). Out of these three terms (AEO, GEO, AIO), AI optimization probably has the least agreed upon definition.

In some places, you’ll see it described as how you use AI to create and optimize your content. An example would be a marketer using ChatGPT to find keywords for a new blog. In other instances, you’ll hear it referred to as the layer tying AEO and GEO together by focusing on the authority signals across your broader digital footprint, not just your website.

Our definition of AIO is closer to the latter. It looks at signals across the internet that help AI systems understand your brand, find credible evidence about it, and describe it accurately. Those signals can influence whether and how your brand is cited or recommended, supporting your broader AEO and GEO efforts.

Some people might be surprised to hear that the signals that help AI trust your brand are pretty similar to the signals that have helped establish trust in traditional search engines. Media coverage, reviews, thought leadership, and consistent mentions across credible third-party sources all help search engines and AI systems develop a clearer picture of your business.

If you’ve worked on an SEO strategy in the past, you’ve probably focused on a lot of these efforts already.

So, it’s fair to ask:why does AIO need to be treated as something different from traditional SEO?

SEO and AIO share many of the same authority-building practices, but they focus on different outcomes. SEO generally focuses on how content performs in traditional search results. AIO focuses on whether AI systems understand and describe your brand accurately and whether they find enough credible evidence to cite or recommend it.

AIO doesn’t necessarily require a completely new set of tactics. What’s different is the environment those tactics are influencing and the outcomes you need to measure. Strong rankings in traditional search results do not tell you whether ChatGPT recommends your brand, just as frequent AI recommendations do not tell you where you rank in traditional search.

In this example, AEO looks at which websites are cited, GEO looks at which brands are recommended, and AIO looks at how those brands are understood and described. More broadly, AIO examines the consistency, credibility, andauthority signals that influence whether AI systems trust, cite, and recommend a brand.

ai12z’s AI Visibility Suite generates reports and roadmaps that show businesses how AI systems understand, describe, cite, and recommend their brands, along with what they can do to improve those results.

The reports bring together insights across AEO, GEO, and AIO, helping you understand what influences how your brand appears in AI-generated answers and where to focus your efforts.For example, the AI Footprint report focuses on those trust and authority signals across the web. It evaluates a brand’s presence, consistency in positioning and messaging, and authority across sources beyond the website, including social media, Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube, and industry publications.

This provides a baseline for understanding where your broader digital footprint is strong and where there are gaps. From there, the report provides prioritized recommendations for strengthening those signals.

Importantly, helping AI understand and trust your brand is an ongoing effort. As you implement those improvements from your roadmap, the reports help you track whether they’re translating into stronger AI visibility over time. Are you appearing more often for the questions and topics that matter? Are you earning more citations? Are you being recommended alongside, or instead of, competitors?

Traditional SEO provides a strong foundation, but AIO focuses on how your brand performs across AI systems. By continually strengthening the signals that shape how your brand is understood, described, cited, and recommended, you can improve your visibility in AI search over time.