Practice notes · Vol. 04 · AI Search
You are either in the answer, or you are not in the market.
Simon White AI is a strategy practice for brands that need to be cited — not just ranked. We design visibility across search engines, answer engines, and generative engines.
The stack
Three disciplines. One public record.
Answer Engine Optimization
Make the brand extractable. Direct answers, citations, and structured proof for machines that would rather quote than link.
Answer engines do not browse. They lift. AEO is the craft of writing so a model can name you, quote you, and stand behind you — in AI Overviews, voice, and chat. Passages, schema, FAQs, and claims with receipts.
- Passage-level answer design
- Claim → evidence pairing
- FAQ and speakable structure
- Citation-ready authorship
Manifesto
Rankings are a receipt. Citations are the shelf. If an engine cannot name you, it will name someone else.
People first, machines second
If a page is not worth reading, it is not worth ranking or citing.
Entities over keywords
Models resolve who you are. Keywords are a dialect, not an identity.
Proof over prose
Claims without sources are ignored by both journalists and models.
One public record
Your site, your profiles, your press, your docs — they must agree.
Capabilities
What the practice does
- 01
Search architecture
Information architecture, crawl, canonicals, and the internal graph that decides what can rank.
- 02
Answer design
Passage engineering so models can extract a clean, attributable answer with your name on it.
- 03
Entity & knowledge
Wikidata, schema, sameAs, and the corroboration loop that turns a brand into a known entity.
- 04
Generative visibility
How you appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot — measured, not hoped.
- 05
Content systems
Editorial calendars that serve people first and machines second, without writing for either poorly.
- 06
Measurement
Share of answer, citation rate, branded queries, and the dashboards that replace vanity rankings.
Visibility lab
Ask the question you should already own.
Paste a brand and a query. The lab scores SEO, AEO, and GEO, writes the citation an engine might give you, and drafts an llms.txt.
Run a reportInsights
Practice notes
New work starts with a brief.
If you already know the question you should own, send it. If you do not, that is the brief.
Request a briefing