AEO

AI search optimization is the practice of improving brands’ odds of being cited and mentioned by answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews. The traffic it earns is small but high-intent. Across more than 1,200 publisher and news sites, visitors referred by AI tools signed up at roughly 11 times the rate of search visitors, according to a Microsoft Clarity study.

Scrunch vs Semrush comes down to one question: Do you need a dedicated AI visibility tool, or a full SEO suite that now tracks AI answers too? Scrunch is an AEO specialist built to monitor how your brand appears in AI-generated answers, while Semrush is a traditional SEO platform that added an AI Visibility Toolkit to a stack marketers already use for keyword research, rank tracking, and backlinks.

Knowing how to rank in search engines and how to rank in AI search results are two different games now.

If you want to know how to get your website indexed by ChatGPT, I’ll show you, but first, I want to clarify: Other articles on this topic conflate “getting indexed by” with “showing up in” ChatGPT — and they are not the same thing. Getting indexed by ChatGPT means OpenAI’s search crawler discovered your page and stored it in OpenAI’s proprietary index (about which very little is publicly known). Showing up in ChatGPT means your content appeared in an answer, which can happen via that index or via a live web fetch triggered by a user’s query.

AI search interfaces are reshaping how content gets surfaced and cited. Pew Research data from 2025 found that around one in five Google searches produced an AI-generated summary, with 88% of those summaries citing three or more sources. Bain’s 2025 research found that roughly 80% of consumers rely on zero-click results in at least 40% of their searches.

Keyword research for AEO can feel overwhelming because audiences are searching for almost everything in AI search, and queries are nuanced and personalized.

I’ve spent the last year watching marketing teams scramble to understand why their organic traffic reports tell one story while their pipeline tells another. The missing link is almost always a need for AI search analytics tools.

The brand tracking dashboard says awareness is up. Social listening tools show steady mention volume. The PR platform logged a dozen media hits last quarter. But, none of those tools show how a brand shows up when a buyer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for a recommendation.