Clear answers to your AI search questions.

DEFINITION

Traditional SEO targets Google’s blue-link results. AI SEO targets the cited sources inside AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Ranking number one on Google is no longer enough when an AI answer above the results answers the buyer’s question without a single click. AI SEO uses different signals: third-party authority on trusted sources, content structured for LLM extraction, a clean entity graph, and AI crawler access.

CITATIONS

When an AI engine (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.) answers a buyer’s question, it draws on web sources and lists some of them at the bottom of the answer or inline. “Cited” means your brand is named in the answer or your domain appears in the source list. Citation is the AI search equivalent of ranking, but it carries different weight at different positions and depends on the engine’s trust signal for the surrounding domains.

OVERLAP

Usually yes, but the work is different. Technical SEO hygiene still matters because LLMs crawl the same web Google does. Keyword-targeted content for informational queries is losing value because AI Overviews answer them directly. We help clients keep the parts of SEO that still work (technical, transactional-query targeting) and replace the parts that no longer do (informational-query content, keyword-density blogs).

SHARE

The percentage of relevant buyer prompts in your category where your brand appears in the cited sources, measured against a defined set of competitors. If we track 100 buyer prompts and your brand is cited in 23 of them while a competitor is cited in 41, your citation share is 23% and theirs is 41%. The metric that matters more than rank.

ENGINES

Five primary engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, and Google Gemini. We track all five weekly. We optimise for all five simultaneously because the signals overlap by roughly 70% and divide the work into universal versus engine-specific from there.

SPEED

First citations on long-tail prompts typically appear within 14 to 45 days. First citations on high-volume category prompts (“best [category] Dubai”) typically take 60 to 120 days. Sustained citation share against a major competitor takes 4 to 9 months. These ranges assume weekly publishing and access to your primary data.

GUARANTEE

No. Citation engines are non-deterministic, they re-rank weekly, and the same prompt can return different answers depending on user context. We guarantee the process: research, publishing cadence, third-party pitches, prompt monitoring, transparent reporting. If the process is not producing results by month two, we tell you, then we re-scope or end the engagement.

MEASURE

Weekly citation tracking against your top three competitors on five engines. Monthly reports with citation share, citation rank, and sentiment. Quarterly business reviews tying citation movement to pipeline metrics from your CRM. The dashboard is yours to keep, even if you stop working with us.

RISK

Structured 60-day review on every engagement. If citation share has not moved by then, we sit down, look at what is working and what is not, and either re-scope or end the engagement. We have ended engagements early when results were not moving, and we will refund a month rather than carry an unhappy account. We would rather lose the revenue than the relationship.

TEAM

Today, the team that pitches you is the team that runs the engagement. Shantanu (founder) is involved at the strategy level on every engagement we currently run. A senior strategist is assigned to your account and named in the proposal. There is no “you will meet your account manager after you sign” handoff in our current model. We do not outsource writing to freelancers. ASAD has access to the wider Tenet team for design, web, and PR when needed.

AI USE

We use AI for research, draft acceleration on outlines, prompt monitoring, quality checks, and translation review. We do not use AI to write the final draft of anything that ships on a client domain. AI-only drafts are not cited by AI search engines, so using them defeats the engagement. Our editorial standards are public on the editorial policy page.

CONTENT

Both options exist. Most clients prefer we draft and they review. The draft is written by a senior strategist who has subject knowledge in your category, not a generalist freelancer. If your in-house team writes, we provide the brief format, the citation framework, and review every draft before publish.

TOOLS

For AI engine prompt monitoring we use a mix of commercial trackers (currently Otterly and Profound) and an internal aggregator. For traditional SEO signals: Ahrefs, SEMrush, SimilarWeb, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, Surfer SEO. For client reporting: Looker Studio, exportable to whatever BI tool your team already uses. The specific commercial tools rotate as the category evolves; we are tool-agnostic and SEO-first.

NDA

Yes, mutual NDA before any strategy session. We will not redo the NDA your legal team sent if it is reasonable. If your NDA includes a non-compete on our category (preventing us from working with anyone in healthtech, for example), we will not sign it.

GCC

Yes. A meaningful share of current engagements are KSA-based, with growing demand in Qatar and Egypt. The Tenet team has worked with brands in the UAE, KSA, wider GCC, India, UK, and US. Most engagements run remotely with quarterly on-site sessions.

ARABIC

Yes, native-Arabic content and Arabic-prompt tracking on every engagement that needs it. Half our engagements run bilingual. We test every brand against Arabic prompts as part of the audit, the results usually expose a citation gap nobody had measured.

PARALLEL

Yes. Several current engagements run as the AI-search specialist alongside a global SEO agency handling traditional organic. We define the boundaries in the contract so there is no overlap or finger-pointing.

SIZE

Mid-market is our centre of gravity (10 to 500 employees, in a category where considered purchases happen), with named enterprise exceptions when the brief is focused. We have worked with both smaller and larger. The deciding factor is not company size, it is whether AI search is actually a meaningful channel for your buyers right now.

FIRST STEP

Most engagements start with a 48-hour AI visibility audit. If the audit surfaces gaps worth fixing, we propose a focused 12-week sprint on one or two priority categories. From there, most clients move to a monthly programme that runs alongside their existing team. Three-month minimum on the programme, 60 days notice to exit.

PROPOSAL

You send a brief through the Get Your Proposal page (or via email). A senior strategist reads it personally and writes a tailored proposal scoped to your situation, not from a template. If we are not the right fit, we will say so and refer you to people we trust.

SAMPLES

Yes. Send a request through the Proposal page with your category, and we will send a redacted sample from a comparable engagement. We do not send the full audit until we have spoken, because half the value is in the conversation around the data.