Here's a situation you've probably run into more than once by now, even if you haven't quite put your finger on it yet. You've got a client who ranks #1 on Google for exactly the term you'd want them to rank for, the kind of result you'd screenshot and put in a case study. Then someone asks ChatGPT the same question, and that client doesn't come up at all, not lower down the list, not mentioned as a decent alternative, just nowhere in the answer.
It isn't a fluke, and it definitely isn't a sign that the SEO work you did was wasted or wrong. It's just a different system altogether, built to answer questions in a completely different way to how Google ranks a page, and once you understand that, it stops being a confusing problem and starts being something you can actually sell.
Why the two don't agree
Google is essentially matching a search to the best-optimised page it can find on the web, which is a job it's been doing for the best part of three decades now and is very good at. AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity aren't really doing that at all, they're doing something closer to what a well-informed friend does when you ask them for a recommendation, which is piece together everything they happen to know about a business, its content, its listings, the reviews people have left, and then decide whether they're confident enough to actually say its name out loud to you. It's less a case of who ranks highest and more a case of who the AI trusts enough to vouch for.
So you end up with the same customer asking roughly the same question, but sitting two completely different tests, and it's entirely possible for a business to pass one and fail the other without anyone having done anything wrong. The two systems are just marking different homework. If you want the fuller picture of how that actually works underneath, we went into it in a lot more depth here: There are two kinds of AI visibility report, and your agency needs both, worth a read when you've got ten minutes.
How to position it to a client: the easiest way to explain this, and the one that tends to land best, is that they haven't actually done anything wrong. Google and AI search are marking two completely different papers, and right now most businesses out there have only sat one of the two exams, simply because nobody's told them there was a second one to prepare for. So it's not a black mark against them, and it's certainly not a reflection on the work you've already done for them either, it's really just the opening for the next bit of work.
Why this is worth raising now
Most agency owners already know AI search is a thing, it's been the industry's favourite topic of conversation for a good two years now, cropping up at every conference and in every second LinkedIn post. What's a lot less settled, in our experience, is what agencies are actually meant to do with that knowledge once they've nodded along to it.
So here's a couple of numbers worth having in your back pocket next time it comes up: 37% of people now say they start their searches with an AI tool rather than Google, and ChatGPT on its own has passed 900 million weekly users. That's not some future trend you get to plan around at your leisure, it's already shaping how your clients' customers are finding them, or more to the point not finding them, this week, while you're reading this.
None of this is about frightening anyone into signing something they don't need. It's simply that "we rank you well on Google" isn't the whole story any more, and there's now a second, genuinely sellable piece of work sitting right alongside the first one.
What you're actually selling
This is usually the bit that gets skipped over, understandably, because it's the hard part. AI visibility isn't, in itself, a line item you can put on an invoice, and if you try to sell it as some abstract concept you'll lose the client halfway through the sentence. The reassuring news is that most of the actual fixes underneath it are small, concrete, and things you're almost certainly set up to deliver already. They're just aimed at a slightly different scoreboard to the one you're used to.
| What the audit turns up | What you sell | Fits as |
|---|---|---|
| Thin, generic service pages | Proper pages that say what the business does, for whom, and where, in plain language | One-off project, or added to an existing content retainer |
| No FAQs | FAQ content built around what customers genuinely ask | Quick win, a good first upsell |
| No schema, no llms.txt | A technical tidy-up | Bundled into a site health check |
| Patchy listings, thin reviews | A listings clean-up and a push for more reviews | Recurring local SEO line |
| Nobody's tracking any of this over time | AI visibility monitoring, checked monthly across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity | New recurring retainer |
You'll notice the first four rows are all one-off, provable pieces of work, basically the same "find it, fix it, prove it" motion you already run for technical SEO, so there's nothing new to learn there. The last row is a bit different, it's not really a fix at all, it's ongoing proof that the fixes you did sell are actually landing, and a genuinely good reason for the client to keep paying you every month rather than disappearing once the project's finished. It's worth selling both together, for much the same reason you'd sell an audit alongside rank tracking rather than picking one over the other.
Pitching a new client
Lead with the specific gap you've found, not the acronym, nobody has ever signed a contract purely because you said "AEO" (answer engine optimisation) with a lot of conviction. They sign because you've shown them, specifically and by name, that they're invisible somewhere their own customers are already looking for exactly what they sell.
In practice that means running the free audit before the call, taking a screenshot of the ChatGPT answer that skips straight past them, and opening the conversation with that. It's concrete, it's about their business and nobody else's, and it leads naturally into the next bit, which is "here's what we'd fix first."
Raising it with an existing client
This one's actually the easier sell, if anything, and it's the one most agencies underuse, probably because it feels a bit awkward to bring up with someone you've worked with for years. But you already have the relationship and the access, so re-run the audit on some of your longest-standing clients and more often than not you'll find the same gap sitting there, completely untouched, because nobody's ever thought to check.
The trick is framing it as the next stage of the work you're already doing for them, rather than as some new alarm going off. Something along the lines of:
"You rank #1 on Google for [term], and that's still great, but we checked what happens when someone asks ChatGPT the same thing, and you don't come up at all. That's increasingly where people are starting to look first. The good news is most of the fix is quick, a few FAQs, a couple of service pages, tidying up your listings, and we can have most of it done this month."
Keep it low-key. It's a specific gap and a next step, nothing more dramatic than that.
How you sell AI visibility in a nutshell
Show the gap, price up the fix, and keep the retainer running as proof it's working. Use it to open new deals and to reopen conversations with clients you've had on your books for years without ever quite getting round to this.
Run a free AI visibility audit on any client or prospect and you'll see exactly where that gap is sitting today.
Coral is Marketing Director at Insites, with more than 10 years leading marketing for B2B and B2C brands. She specialises in brand strategy and growth, building marketing functions that stay aligned with commercial goals and turn marketing investment into measurable results.
