Search has changed, and rankings alone no longer tell the story
For twenty years, showing up in search meant one thing: rank on the first page of Google. That still matters, but it is no longer the whole job. Google now answers many searches with an AI Overview before the first result. People ask ChatGPT and Perplexity for recommendations. Voice assistants read out one answer, not ten links.
Those systems do not “rank” pages the way a results page does. They read your site, decide whether they understand and trust what you do, and then decide whether to cite or recommend you when someone asks. A business can rank well and still be invisible in the answer, and that is where clicks and calls are quietly going.
AI search optimization closes that gap. It keeps the discipline of classic SEO and adds two things: content structured so answer engines can quote it (AEO), and authority signals that make generative engines treat you as a source worth citing (GEO).
What we actually do
Every engagement starts with the audit, because the fix depends on what is broken. From there the work falls into three layers.
The foundation. Search engines and AI crawlers have to read the site cleanly. We fix crawl and indexing issues, speed, canonical and duplicate-URL problems, and add structured data that describes your organization, services, locations and FAQs in the vocabulary machines use. We make sure your name, address, phone and services say exactly the same thing everywhere: on the site, in schema and on your Google Business Profile.
The content. We map the questions your customers ask, from “how much does it cost” to “who does this near me”, and build pages that answer them directly in the first paragraph, then earn the depth. Service pages, location pages and articles are written to be quoted, with visible FAQs and the matching structured data.
The authority. Generative engines lean on sources that other sources reference. We create the original explanations, checklists and comparisons that get cited, and pursue the mentions, listings and reviews that reinforce them.
How we measure it
You get one monthly review that shows rankings, Search Console impressions and clicks, how often your business is cited in AI answers for tracked questions, and what all of that turned into: calls, form submissions and booked work. If something is not moving, the plan changes. That is what the analytics work is for.
Why Terraform Digital
We build websites as well as optimize them, so technical recommendations do not end with a report you have to hand to someone else. We are a Minnesota agency that works with local and growing businesses, and we optimize our own site the same way, with visible FAQs, structured data and an llms.txt file you can read.