If you pay attention to the information and advice flying around the fast-moving but still-new world of AI search and generative engine optimization (GEO), you will almost always see the word “product” in the advice. The advice is geared toward B2B product companies—most often those selling SaaS.
Well, you’re selling and marketing professional services, and that is very different from product sales and marketing—typically, professional services require a much more delicate dance compared to the smash-mouth you-need-it-now world of product marketing. And that means the AI visibility advice you’re most likely to see isn’t suitable for your firm.
With the caveat that AI search is changing very rapidly, this is the formula to increase your firm’s presence on AI engines like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. AI will soon be the default channel for people to discover new information, and if you fall behind now, that means fewer opportunities, shortlists and RFPs in the future.
Step 1: Get Your Website Technically Right
We start with your website, because it’s the easiest thing for you to control—this is the digital property you own, so you should be able to make changes quickly (and start to see an uptick in your AI visibility in just a few weeks).
Ideally, you can tweak your existing website to help AI models figure out who you are and whether to trust you.
However, let’s be honest—a lot of services firms’ websites are either a) old, meaning you last launched a brand new website four or more years ago or b) a convoluted mess, a digital sprawl that made sense once upon a time but has had practice area and sections bolted on in a way that makes no sense to a site visitor.
In these cases, it is likely time for a new website. You may not have budgeted for that this year, but the opportunity cost of limping along with your old, janky site is significant—and maybe even a threat to the long term viability of your business.
Either way, here are the technical basics every website needs in the era of AI search.
- Make sure you have a clear site architecture. This means logical URL structures, clean internal linking, and well-organized content hierarchy. The goal is to make it simple for AI models to map your expertise.
- Allow AI crawlers. Make sure robots.txt isn’t blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, GoogleBot for AI Overviews and PerplexityBot. If they can’t crawl you, they can’t cite you.
- Add schema markup. Implement structured data (JSON-LD) for your organization, people, articles, FAQs and services. This helps AI models understand what your content is and who is behind it.
- Make sure you have fast load times. As with SEO, slow sites get deprioritized across the board by AI. Plus, you know as a consumer how annoying a slow website is.
- Make your experts visible on your site with named bios, authorship on articles and Person schema markup.
Step 2: Write Website Copy for AI
The copy on your website’s service pages should be both concise and complete, something that’s easy to say and hard to do. But wait, it gets more complex! You also need to have website copy that triggers an emotional response in your human clients, and appeals to the logic of AI.
These are some skinny needles to thread.
Don’t create vague lists of capabilities that could be on any other firm’s website. Lean into structured content formats, like FAQs, comparison pages and glossary-style deep dives on your niche industries and expertise.
It’s clear that AI engines have a recency bias. In the spring of 2026, a study by AI visibility platform Scrunch showed that most AI citations have a half-life of 4–6 weeks, meaning a citation that’s moving the needle for you today will start to lose its “GEO juice” in just a few weeks.
Therefore, it behooves every professional services firm to treat its website like a living, organic thing, i.e., it needs to be fed. We’ve seen some advice that you should update your website pages quarterly—let’s be honest, that’s just not feasible for most firms. But you should consider it directionally correct, and set up a schedule of frequent audits and updates to keep your content as fresh as possible without busting the budget.
Step 3. Crank Up the Thought Leadership Engine
Every professional services firm should be creating thought leadership content. Every business needs to showcase its product in public, and the quality of your firm’s thinking is what you’re selling. Your POV is your product. Because you get hired for your thinking, you should do your thinking in public. That’s thought leadership.
Start by posting as often as you can to your company blog, and keep it focused—talk about what you do. The old SEO trick of trying to vulture traffic by newsjacking the Stranger Things finale or Taylor Swift’s new album will get you nowhere anymore.
Better yet, organize your thought leadership efforts around what we call GEO sprints—focused campaigns to win specific sets of prompts that sit in the middle of the Venn diagram of the services you offer and what your clients crave. The sprints should focus on your blog, but also service pages and offsite mentions in the media and on LinkedIn.
Also, don’t sleep on conducting original research. In this Age of the Hot Take, everyone has an opinion; being able to back your opinion with facts and data is a true differentiator, and fuel for thought leadership content and public relations opportunities.
Step 4. Focus on Content Distribution
We spend all this time creating thought leadership content, and then we don’t get enough mileage out of it. No, it isn’t just you—just about every firm struggles with this.
This means two channels—earned media and shared media. That is, media placements through public relations and frequent posts on social media, which for professional services firms means LinkedIn.
Earned media is the heavy hitter. Getting placements in media outlets exposes your brand and your thinking to a whole new audience; whoever reads or views that outlet is exposed to your message. Media companies work tirelessly to cultivate large but focused audiences; being featured in a place that your ICP frequents and trusts is a home run. Because your POV, story or message has to be approved by an editor, your future clients trust it more than they’ll trust a claim you make on your own website. Better yet, LLMs seek out the credibility of different websites, and media sites deliver—Muck Rack reported last year that 27% of AI citations were from journalistic sources.
Similarly, LinkedIn is vitally important for AI visibility. Over the last 12–18 months, LinkedIn has consistently been mentioned as one of the top sources cited by AI engines in their responses. Consistent, substantive posting from your subject matter experts isn’t just a brand awareness play anymore. Yes, LinkedIn is a very crowded arena, but it is a place to demonstrate your expertise.
A couple of keys to LinkedIn success:
- People first, brand second. Remember that LinkedIn is a social network—that means people seek out knowledge and interactions with other people, and it’s also what the LinkedIn algorithm favors. So your subject matter experts need to be posting and interacting. Once they’re doing this on a regular basis, your company page should reshare their content.
- Coach up your SMEs. It isn’t enough to like someone’s job promotion or the picture of colleagues at a trade show. Show your SMEs how to consistently turn their opinions into thoughtful, thought-provoking content. Borrow heavily from the company’s blog posts, eBooks and webinars. Post frequently, but always focus on quality.
Step 5: Monitor and Adjust
Online visibility is changing rapidly, so what works today might not work as well six months from now. Don’t get stuck running yesterday’s playbook. Successful firms will continuously monitor what’s working for them. We all have to find the line between sticking with a strategy and logically adjusting as human behavior and algorithms evolve.
Remember, and make sure your C-suite understands, that being visible in the AI search era is not a one-time project. This is an approach that requires constant care. Just like going to the gym, you’re not going to be done in six weeks. This is a corporate lifestyle change—embrace it and you’ll be in great shape for years to come.