Is AI visibility just SEO with a new name?

AI visibility overlaps with SEO. Then the website stops being enough.

If you lead marketing at a European B2B tech company, you should keep the useful parts of SEO: technical hygiene, clear pages, useful explanations and a site that makes sense to humans and machines.

The sharper point is that SEO and AI visibility do different jobs.

SEO helps a page get found.

AI visibility asks whether your company is mentioned, understood, recommended and supported when a buyer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini what to choose.

That is a wider field of evidence. It includes your website, but it also includes the places that shape what LLMs know about your company.

SEO helps a page get found. AI visibility evaluates the business.

A traditional search journey often starts with a query and a list of pages.

The work is familiar. Make the page technically sound. Match the search intent. Explain the topic clearly. Earn authority. Help the page appear when someone searches.

That work still matters. I would not defund SEO because the acronym has acquired a new neighbour.

But an AI answer often compresses the journey. Imagine a buyer asking:

“Which European project management tools are best for a 200-person software company?”

The answer may name three companies, describe their strengths, compare them with alternatives and suggest one for a particular use case.

The buyer is looking for more than a page. They are asking for a view of the market.

So the useful test becomes four questions:

1. Is the brand mentioned?
2. Is it understood correctly?
3. Is it recommended for the buyer’s situation?
4. Is it praised for a reason the company would recognise as true?

A company can pass one question and fail the next.

It can be mentioned because an LLM has seen its name, but described as serving the wrong market. It can be understood, but never recommended. It can be recommended for a reason that sounds suspiciously like a former positioning document nobody has opened since 2021.

That is why a single visibility score without an explanation is not very helpful. You need to know which part of the ladder is breaking.

The thing being judged has changed

SEO work often focuses on a page, a query or a group of related pages.

AI visibility looks at the company as an entity.

What does it do? Who is it for? What alternatives is it compared with? Which problems does it solve? Is it credible? Does the description stay consistent across different answers and different LLMs?

Your own website has an important role here. It should explain the company clearly. It should make the product, customer, use case and point of difference easy to understand.

A vague website creates vague answers. That part is not mysterious.

But the company is also being described outside the website. Review sites, directories, publications, partner pages, community threads and comparison posts can all influence the information an LLM uses when forming an answer.

This is where the commercial distinction appears.

SEO can help a page win a position.

AI visibility depends on whether the wider body of information makes the company easy to identify, understand and recommend.

You are no longer improving only one page for one query. You are making the whole company easier to understand across the sources buyers and LLMs use.

Your website is one witness, not the whole case

Companies naturally start with their own websites. They control them, they can edit them and the analytics are tidy enough to make everyone feel briefly in charge.

The outside world is less cooperative.

A buyer may find a company through a review site, a partner recommendation, an industry publication or a discussion thread. Those sources may explain the product in language the company would never use on its own site. Sometimes that language is more useful. Sometimes it is simply wrong and has been copied around like a rumour in an office kitchen.

LLMs can use those sources when they answer a buyer’s question.

This creates two jobs:

• Make the owned website clear enough to explain what the company does.
• Improve the independent evidence that helps other people trust and describe it.

The second job is where many SEO programmes become too narrow. Publishing another generic article about “what is customer data?” may help fill a calendar. It may also make nobody care, including the LLM.

The more useful work is often closer to reputation and positioning:

• Make sure relevant review profiles describe the product accurately.
• Build partner pages that explain the use case in plain language.
• Earn comparison coverage where buyers already assess alternatives.
• Contribute to the industry discussions where the category is actually being discussed.
• Find repeated misunderstandings and fix the source that created them.

This is about building credible understanding, rather than manufacturing praise or scattering the company name across the internet. That creates noise, not credibility.

The aim is simpler: make the company easier to understand from more than one trustworthy source.

What should a marketing lead fund?

My advice is straightforward.

Keep funding the SEO foundations.

A clean site, useful product pages, clear category language and genuinely helpful content support both search and AI visibility. LLMs still need clear information about what you do. Humans do too, although humans have the courtesy to complain when the page takes nine seconds to load.

Stop treating rankings and referral traffic as the full picture.

Rankings tell you that a page can be found for a particular search. Referral traffic tells you that some visits arrived through a measurable path. Neither tells you what ChatGPT says when a buyer asks which company to choose.

Analytics are useful, but they only show the part of the journey you can measure. They do not show every shortlist conversation that happens before a buyer visits your site.

Start funding the wider source ecosystem.

That means clear positioning, accurate third-party profiles, credible reviews, partner coverage, useful comparison content and participation in the places your market already trusts.

The work should start with evidence, not guesses. Ask the LLMs what they currently say about you. Then look at the sources behind the answer. Are they using your own pages? A stale directory? A review from three years ago? A competitor’s comparison page? A thread that gets your category right but your product completely wrong?

Once you can see the gap, the next move is usually less glamorous than a new content campaign. Update the right page. Correct the wrong description. Improve the review profile. Give partners language they can use. Publish the explanation buyers actually need.

No secret prompt required. Just slightly less pretending that the website is the entire market.

A two-minute check before you move budget

You can run this manually before using a tool such as Heralded.

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.

Ask each one how it would solve your buyer’s problem without naming your company.

For example:

“What would you recommend for a European B2B software company that needs to reduce manual reporting across several teams?”

Use the same category question in all three tools. Do not add your brand name. Do not give them a list of companies to choose from.

Record three things:

1. Do you appear at all?
2. Which competitors appear instead?
3. What reasons does each answer give for recommending them?

Then apply the four-question ladder.

Are you mentioned? Are you understood? Are you recommended? Are you praised for something specific and credible?

The differences between ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini matter. One may understand your category but omit your company. Another may mention you but attach the wrong use case. A third may recommend a competitor because its independent sources are clearer or more plentiful.

That is a much better starting point than checking whether your homepage ranks for one valuable keyword and declaring the market informed.

The operating distinction

Here is the version I would put into a marketing plan:

Keep funding technical SEO and genuinely useful pages.

Stop funding content that only tries to win a page position without making the company clearer to a buyer.

Start funding clear positioning and credible third-party evidence that can help LLMs understand and recommend the brand.

SEO remains part of the job. It is simply no longer a complete description of the job.

The website explains what you want the market to know. AI visibility shows what the market, and the LLMs reading it, can actually say about you.

Run the two-minute check today. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini the same buyer question without naming your brand. Record whether you appear, which competitors appear instead and why each one is recommended.

If you would rather have the evidence gathered in one place, run the free Heralded scan. Either way, start with the answer a buyer could receive, not the one your homepage hoped to give them.