Guide
What Is AI Visibility?
AI visibility is the degree to which AI answer engines mention, cite and accurately describe your brand when people ask about your category.
AI Visibility Turkey is the Turkish-market home of Zen Media, Optimum7 and ecommerce.com.
Three concepts: mention, citation, recommendation
Your brand can show up in an AI answer in three different ways. Counting them separately makes it clear what to fix.
Mention
Your name appears in the text of the answer. The lowest bar: the brand was named, but not necessarily as a source, and how it was described may not matter.
Citation
The AI names your company in its answer; engines often also show a page link as a source next to it. We count two things separately: was your name given, and was a link shown.
Recommendation
The AI presents you as an option worth choosing. The most valuable outcome and the hardest to measure: the tone and reasoning of the answer must be read.
Branded and non-branded questions
If your name is in the question, it is a branded question: the buyer already knows you. What matters most are non-branded questions, where the buyer did not type your name and the AI chose you itself. A non-branded citation is where a new customer first finds you.
Is Örnek Hukuk Bürosu any good?
Illustrative: not a measured result.
Which law firm is recommended for company formation in Istanbul?
Illustrative: not a measured result.
Örnek Hukuk Bürosu is a placeholder name, not a real firm; the questions are illustrative.
GEO, AEO and LLM SEO
Different labels are attached to the same work. Whichever you hear, the subject is being visible in AI answers.
GEO: generative engine optimization
Preparing content so generative AI answers use it as a source. The term was formalized in a 2023 academic paper. In Turkish: "Üretken Motor Optimizasyonu".
AEO: answer engine optimization
Content and page structure that gives a direct, short, quotable answer to a question. In Turkish: "Yanıt Motoru Optimizasyonu" or "Cevap Motoru Optimizasyonu".
LLM SEO
Another name for the same idea: the work of being visible in assistants built on large language models (LLMs).
Note: these are our working definitions
There is no single industry-wide definition of these terms. The meanings used here are our own working definitions. Agencies and media in Turkey also use several labels side by side (GEO agency, AI SEO, yapay zeka SEO). For short definitions see the glossary.
Source: GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (arXiv 2311.09735) ↗
How an AI answer is built
Engines work differently, but there is a common spine: a question arrives, relevant sources are found, an answer is written and some sources are shown.
1. Question and fan-out. Google describes AI Mode as splitting a question into subtopics and running many related searches together, called query fan-out. That is why AI Mode can reach a wider set of links than classic search. AI Overviews, by contrast, appear only when Google’s systems judge them useful, so they often do not trigger.
2. Access and retrieval. The engine retrieves relevant pages from what it has indexed. Where a bot cannot reach your page, your page cannot enter the answer.
3. Generation and citation. The model writes the answer and shows sources. According to xAI’s documentation, Grok returns all citations while the model itself decides on inline citations.
The starting premise of our offer is that AI often names three to five companies rather than a long list of links. This is our working premise, not a statistic.
Source: Google Search Central: AI features ↗; xAI: citations ↗
How it differs from SEO
The two systems complement each other but are not the same. A site that ranks well on Google can still go unnamed in AI answers.
Scroll the table sideways.
| Topic | Classic SEO | AI visibility |
|---|---|---|
| Output | A ranked list of links | An answer that names companies and shows sources |
| How many results | Many results across pages | Often three to five names (our working premise) |
| Measure of success | Rank, clicks | Answer share (AI share of voice), citations, source mix (our method) |
| Relation to Google | The Google ranking is the goal | Overlap with Google is partial and varies by engine |
| What Google itself needs | Indexing, content quality, page experience | The same: per Google, AI features also need an indexed, snippet-eligible page. On Google, GEO is largely strong SEO plus entity and data hygiene. |
Source: Google Search Central: AI features
There is no secret technique
Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode have no additional technical requirements and need no special "AI text file" or special structured data. Appearing is never guaranteed. Stay away from anyone who promises it.
Source: Google Search Central: AI features ↗; Google: Succeeding in AI search ↗
What works and what does not
We separate the evidence plainly: what engines document themselves on one side, research findings and vendor claims on the other.
Controls the engines document
Indexing and snippet eligibility (Google)
Per Google, to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex limit display.
Access for search bots
OpenAI documents that OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT search; GPTBot is a separate setting for training. Anthropic documents that blocking Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User may reduce visibility in Claude search answers.
Training versus search
Google-Extended is a robots.txt token for Gemini training and grounding; it does not affect inclusion in Search. Which bots you allow is a business decision.
Structured data that matches visible text
Google requires markup to match visible content. Valid markup does not guarantee display; its value is clarity.
Research findings and weak evidence
The GEO paper. The KDD 2024 paper by Aggarwal and colleagues (arXiv 2311.09735) reports that GEO methods can boost visibility in generative engine responses "by up to 40%". In the paper’s table the best methods were Cite Sources, Quotation Addition and Statistics Addition; keyword stuffing did not perform well. Effects varied by domain.
Read this: it is not a promise
The paper was tested on a research engine and the GEO-bench dataset, not on live ChatGPT or Google. We do not promise you the same lift.
llms.txt. An informal proposal by Jeremy Howard, first published on 3 September 2024; it is not a ratified standard. As reported, Google’s John Mueller has said no AI system uses it and Google Search does not need it for AI Overviews or AI Mode. We treat it as optional, low-cost hygiene, never as a ranking lever.
Source: arXiv 2311.09735 ↗; llmstxt.org ↗; Search Engine Roundtable ↗
The Turkey context
Generative AI use in Turkey roughly doubled in a year, and Google’s AI search features opened in Turkish.
The press reports ChatGPT as the most used AI assistant in Turkey; we give no exact share. Türkiye Today ↗
Your buyers in Turkey ask in Turkish; your buyers abroad often ask in English, sometimes in German, Arabic or Russian. We found no evidence that engines prefer one language when citing, so we test both. Our priorities in Turkey are health tourism, private hospitals, exporters, premium ecommerce, real estate firms selling to foreigners, and law and professional services: health tourism, exporters, ecommerce.
Explore all Turkey data with sources → · Google AI Overviews and AI Mode in Turkey →
Options
The first six of the things you can buy for AI visibility. Each carries its own evidence status.
Scroll the table sideways.
| Option | What it is | Evidence status | Read more |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Visibility audit and prompt tracking | Runs buyer questions and records how your brand and competitors are named. | Our method | Read |
| 2. Technical AI crawl access | robots.txt, CDN and WAF rules, indexing and server-rendered HTML. | Documented by the engine | Read |
| 3. Structured data and entity optimization | JSON-LD that matches visible text and a consistent brand entity. The value is clarity, not a guaranteed lift. | Documented by the engine | Read |
| 4. Content for answer engines | Question plus short direct answer, lists and tables, citable sentences. | Documented by the engine | Read |
| 5. Digital PR and citation building | Mentions on the sources engines already cite. | Vendor research | Read |
| 6. Reviews and third-party mentions | Profile data and review strategy; LLM impact beyond Google guidance is vendor-level only. | Vendor research | Read |
Frequently asked
What is AI visibility?
Is it the same as GEO and AEO?
Can appearing in AI answers be guaranteed?
What should I do first?
Where does your brand stand in AI answers?
Send us your website and topics and we will reply by email. We measure first, then decide together what to fix.