More of your customers are asking an assistant instead of scrolling a results page. When they ask "who's a good supplier in Kochi?", the answer is one paragraph naming two or three businesses. Generative Engine Optimization is the work of being one of them — and it is included in our ₹5,000 a month plan, not sold as an upgrade.
AI SEO — also called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — is the work of making a business likely to be named and cited when someone asks an AI assistant a question instead of typing it into a search box. It overlaps with classic SEO, but the mechanism differs: there is no position one, only whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews draw on your pages when they write their answer.
That difference matters commercially. Ten blue links gave ten businesses a chance to be clicked. One AI paragraph names two or three. The distribution is narrower, which makes being included worth more — and being absent cost more.
HINALL is Hinall AI Labs Pvt Ltd, a software company in Kochi, Kerala. We build hospital management software, we build business websites, and we do this work on our own site before we sell it — our llms.txt is live, our schema is published, and our facts are stated the same way everywhere.
This subject attracts a great deal of confident nonsense. Here is what is actually going on, as plainly as we can put it.
When an assistant answers, it pulls the specific chunk of text that addresses the question. A short page that answers in its first two lines beats a 3,000-word page where the answer is buried in paragraph nine. Formatting is not cosmetic here — it decides retrievability.
A model will not state a fact it cannot corroborate. If your name, city, services or price differ between your website, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile and directory listings, it has nothing solid to say and will hedge or pick wrong. Reconciling those sources is the highest-value work in AI SEO and the least glamorous.
In classic SEO an unlinked mention does little. For a language model, being described in text — on a directory, a forum, a news page, a supplier list — is exactly the signal it learns from, link or no link. Getting accurately described across the web matters more than accumulating anchor text.
Most business-specific answers are assembled live from web results rather than recalled from training. That means Google and Bing indexing remains the foundation. A site that is not indexed is not retrievable, and no amount of AI-specific work changes that.
Answers from a mix of training data and live web search. Business-specific questions almost always trigger retrieval, which is the part you can influence quickly.
The AI block above the normal results. It draws heavily on pages that already rank well, so classic SEO and AI SEO reinforce each other here more than anywhere else.
Retrieval-first and unusually explicit about citing sources, which makes it the cleanest place to check whether your pages are actually being found and quoted.
Both lean on their parent search indexes. If your site is invisible to Google and Bing crawlers, it is invisible here too — indexing comes first.
Ten concrete pieces of work, all of them inside the same flat ₹5,000 per month plan that covers your website and your classic SEO. There is no separate AI SEO invoice, because separating them would be dishonest — most of this work improves both.
Get a Free AI Visibility CheckThis field is new enough that plenty of tactics are being sold before anyone has checked whether they survive contact with a quality system.
Invisible text telling a model what to say about you. It is detectable, it is manipulation, and it puts your domain at risk for a trick that stops working.
Hundreds of near-identical AI articles to "feed the models". This is precisely what scaled-content-abuse systems exist to catch, and it drags the whole domain down.
Invented testimonials, review counts, awards or case studies in your schema. Fake structured data is a markup violation, and in several markets fake reviews are illegal.
No agency controls what an assistant says. We will tell you what we changed and what the monthly test showed. That is the honest deliverable.
There is no Search Console for AI assistants. So we build the closest honest substitute: a written list of the questions your customers would genuinely ask, put to four assistants every month, with the results logged.
For each question we record:
The honest caveat: this is sampling, not analytics. Assistants can give different answers to the same question on different days, and none of them publish impression data. We report the log as it is, including the months when nothing moved. A field this young does not yet support better measurement than that, and we would rather say so than dress it up.
Health questions are where assistants are most cautious about their sources, because medical answers fall under Google's YMYL rules and carry real consequences. That caution rewards providers whose credentials, specialties and departments are described precisely and consistently. HINALL builds the hospital management software clinics run on, so we can describe a hospital accurately in schema and in content — which is most of the battle.
See Healthcare SEOAI SEO, also called Generative Engine Optimization or GEO, is the work of making your business likely to be mentioned and cited when someone asks an AI assistant a question instead of typing it into Google. It overlaps with classic SEO but the mechanism is different: there is no position one, only whether an assistant names you in its answer.
Classic SEO competes for a position in a list of ten links. AI SEO competes to be one of the few sources an assistant draws on when it writes a single paragraph. Three practical differences follow. Assistants retrieve passages rather than whole pages, so the answer has to sit near the top of your page. Consistency of facts across the web matters more than link count, because a model needs to be confident before it states something. And unlinked mentions of your business count, which they largely do not in classic SEO.
No. Nobody can, and anyone who offers that guarantee is selling something else. AI assistants do not expose a ranking dial, their retrieval behaviour changes without notice, and the same question can produce different sources on different days. What we can do is remove the reasons a model would not cite you — contradictory facts, uncrawlable pages, no structured data, no clear answer on the page — and then measure whether it starts happening.
By testing, monthly and on the record. We write down the questions your customers would actually ask, put each one to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Gemini, and log whether your business appeared, how it was described, and which page was cited. Over months that log is the visibility trend for this channel. It is less precise than Search Console, which is an honest limitation of a young field rather than something we can engineer away.
llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of your site that describes your business and points to your most important pages in a form language models can read easily. It is a voluntary, emerging convention, not an official standard and not a guaranteed ranking factor. It costs very little to add and it gives you one clear place to state your facts correctly, so we include it. HINALL publishes its own at hinall.com/llms.txt.
No, and treating it as a replacement is the most expensive mistake available right now. Most AI answers about businesses are assembled from live web results, which means being indexed and ranking well in Google is still the foundation. AI SEO is a layer on top of technical and on-page SEO, not a substitute for it. If your site is not indexed, no amount of AI optimisation will help.
Almost always because the web disagrees with itself about you. An old address on a directory, a different company name on LinkedIn, a price listed on one page and contradicted on another, a service you stopped offering three years ago still described on a listing site. A model reading those sources has no single confident fact to state, so it either picks the wrong one or hedges. Fixing this is unglamorous correction work and it is the highest-value part of AI SEO.
It is a real decision with a genuine trade-off, and it depends on what your site is for. Blocking AI user agents protects your content from being used in training, but it also makes you unlikely to be retrieved and cited. For a business that wants customers to find it, being citable is usually worth more than the content is. For a publisher whose content is the product, the calculation can go the other way. We will walk you through it rather than decide silently.
Yes. Hidden text instructing a model what to say about you is prompt injection, it is detectable, and it puts your domain at risk. Mass-generated filler articles are exactly what quality systems are built to catch. Fake reviews are illegal in several markets and increasingly easy to spot. Everything we do to a client site is something we would be comfortable showing to Google, because the same page has to survive both systems.
At HINALL, AI search optimisation is not a separate line item. It is part of the flat ₹5,000 per month plan, alongside on-page SEO, technical SEO, local SEO and website development. There is no setup fee and no lock-in contract.
Technical groundwork — schema, llms.txt, answer-first formatting, crawlability — is done in the first few weeks. Assistants reflecting corrected facts about you takes longer, typically two to four months, because it depends on their retrieval catching up with the changes and on new consistent mentions accumulating across the web. Facts absorbed during model training move slower still and are largely outside anyone's control.
Yes, and healthcare is where accuracy matters most. Medical queries fall under Google's YMYL rules and AI assistants are correspondingly cautious about which health sources they cite. HINALL builds hospital management software, so we understand clinical vocabulary and department structures well enough to describe a hospital correctly in schema and in content.
AI SEO sits on top of the fundamentals. These cover the rest.
Send us your website and the questions your customers ask. We will put them to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode, and send you back exactly what came out — whether you appeared, how you were described, and who appeared instead. Free, and often uncomfortable reading.