Ghostart FAQ

AI visibility is whether, and how often, your business appears when people use AI platforms to research, compare and choose businesses, products or services.

Someone might ask: “Who are the best accountants for a small business in Manchester?” Or: “Which of these three accountants would you recommend?”

If your business appears in those answers, that’s part of your AI visibility.

It isn’t a single ranking. AI answers can vary between platforms, questions and even repeated asks of the same question.

People increasingly encounter AI-generated answers while researching products, services and businesses, both through dedicated AI tools and within search engines.

That changes the visibility question. “Where do I rank?” now comes with a second question: “Am I in the answer?”

If a potential customer asks AI who to use and your business isn’t part of the answer, you may never know that opportunity existed.

It could be part of the explanation, but it won’t necessarily be the only one.

Google increasingly provides AI-generated answers directly within search, while tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity give people another way to research without following the traditional search-results journey.

Algorithm changes, competition, changes in customer behaviour and the quality of your existing search presence can all affect traffic too.

The important change is structural: traditional search is no longer the only way people find information and decide what to do next.

That means businesses increasingly need to understand both their search visibility and their visibility inside AI-generated answers.

Start by finding out where you stand.

Ghostart tests the kinds of questions your customers ask and shows you where your business appears, where it doesn’t and which competitors appear instead.

That gives you something concrete to work from, rather than trying to follow every new piece of GEO advice on the internet.

From there, Ghostart helps identify what deserves attention and what you could do next.

Ghostart helps you move from seeing your AI visibility to doing something about it. It helps you:

See where you stand

Test important customer questions across major AI platforms.

Understand what’s holding you back

See where competitors appear instead, what sources are influencing answers and where the gaps are.

Know what to work on next

Identify the opportunities that deserve attention first.

Turn expertise into useful content

Use what you and the people inside your business know to create specific, useful and well-supported content.

Strengthen your wider presence

Identify opportunities beyond your own website where information about your business could be stronger.

Measure. Learn. Improve.

Keep testing the questions that matter and see what’s changing.

Ghostart checks major AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, plus Google’s AI experiences.

Exact platform coverage depends on your Ghostart plan.

Ghostart repeatedly tests the questions that matter to your business and records what happens. You can see where you’re appearing, where you’re missing and how that develops over time.

There’s an important reason we don’t turn that into a simple “ChatGPT ranking”: AI answers vary. Ask the same platform the same question repeatedly and the businesses and sources it returns can change.

So we treat an individual AI answer as an observation rather than a permanent position, and use repeated measurements to build a more useful picture over time.

No. And we’d be wary of anyone who says they can.

Whether an AI platform names a business can depend on the question, the information available, the sources retrieved, the platform being used and other factors outside Ghostart’s control.

Ghostart can help you understand where you currently stand, identify things worth improving and measure what happens afterwards.

We can’t guarantee what an AI platform will say.

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. It’s one of the terms used to describe work intended to improve how businesses, brands and information appear within generative AI answers.

That’s the area Ghostart works in, but we generally use AI visibility because it describes the business outcome more clearly.

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation. It’s another term used for improving visibility in systems that answer questions directly rather than simply returning a traditional list of links.

You’ll also encounter terms including LLMO, GSO and AI SEO. The terminology hasn’t settled yet, and there is considerable overlap between them. We don’t think businesses should need to master the jargon to improve how they’re found.

No, although there’s significant overlap.

SEO is primarily concerned with visibility in search-engine results. AI visibility is concerned with whether and how your business appears within AI-generated answers.

Many of the fundamentals can help both: a clear website, useful information, credible evidence and genuine subject expertise.

There’s one more difference that matters. AI systems don’t have to rely only on what you say about yourself. They can encounter information about your business across many different sources.

No. Your website matters, but it’s only part of the information available about your business.

Studies measure this in different ways. Muck Rack analysed more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini and classified 84% of the citations as earned media. That is vendor data, from a company selling into this category, and it describes the sources cited in its sample rather than everything a model read. An independent University of Toronto study of consumer-electronics queries found that earned media made up 46–65% of the sources each of four AI tools cited, and that brand-owned sites made up less than half in every one.

Different methodologies produce different numbers, so we don’t think it’s sensible to claim there’s one universal percentage. But they point towards an important practical conclusion: your AI visibility can depend on information that exists beyond your own website.

That can include directories, reviews, articles, professional profiles, independent coverage and other publicly available sources.

No. A strong website and good search fundamentals remain important.

Ghostart adds another layer: understanding how your business appears when customers use AI to research and make decisions, identifying what might strengthen that presence and measuring what happens over time.

AI visibility and SEO are increasingly connected. You should think of them together rather than choosing one instead of the other.

No. More content isn’t the objective.

Ghostart helps identify where useful information is missing and what might be worth creating or improving.

Sometimes that could mean a new article. But it could also mean improving an existing page, answering a customer question more clearly, adding evidence, capturing expertise from somebody inside the business or strengthening information somewhere else.

The aim is to create what’s needed, and leave the internet no more cluttered than it was.

The Beige-ometer is Ghostart’s content quality tool. It looks for places where content is becoming generic, abstract or poorly supported and helps make it more specific, useful and credible.

It scores content across two dimensions, Craft and Cite, and shows what’s weakening the content, examples from the writing and practical ways to improve it.

We think some of the characteristics it measures may go with greater citability. We don’t claim that’s proven.

Ghostart Labs has registered research to test whether higher substance and citability scores go with higher observed AI-answer citation rates. If the data doesn’t support the hypothesis, we’ll publish that too.

Because useful expertise often sits with people rather than on corporate web pages. Founders, specialists, salespeople and other employees accumulate experience, examples, evidence and judgement through actually doing their jobs.

There’s also some interesting evidence about how content from individuals is already appearing in AI sources. A 2026 Semrush analysis of 325,000 AI-search prompts found that, within the LinkedIn content cited in ChatGPT and Google’s AI results in its dataset, content from individual profiles accounted for the majority rather than company pages.

That’s one vendor’s dataset, and the result shouldn’t be turned into a universal rule that “AI prefers people”. But it supports the broader reason Ghostart helps businesses work through their people: valuable knowledge doesn’t only live on the company website.

More knowledgeable voices give a business more genuine expertise, experience and perspectives to make discoverable.

No. You can use Ghostart as an individual business owner or marketer.

Having more people involved can be useful, because different people hold different expertise, experiences and perspectives. But a team is a capability, not a requirement.

It depends on what Ghostart identifies.

Some opportunities might involve a relatively small improvement to information that already exists. Others could involve creating something new, capturing specialist expertise or strengthening your presence elsewhere.

Ghostart is designed to help you focus on the work most worth doing, rather than creating content or activity for its own sake.

No. AI visibility is a developing field.

There is useful research into how AI systems retrieve and cite information, and we can directly observe how businesses appear across different questions and platforms. But that isn’t the same as having a universal recipe that guarantees recommendation.

We think it’s important to distinguish between three things:

What we can observe

What AI platforms actually return when questions are tested.

What existing evidence suggests

Patterns found in academic, industry and vendor research.

What we hypothesise

Ideas that look plausible but still need proper testing.

Ghostart is built to act on the best evidence available while being explicit about where uncertainty remains.

Not every assumption behind Ghostart has been proven, and we don’t think pretending otherwise would help anyone. That’s why we created Ghostart Labs.

We’re testing questions that matter to our own product, including whether characteristics measured by the Beige-ometer go with AI citation, and whether content suggested through Ghostart subsequently appears in AI sources.

We’re also building a standing panel of 240 publicly listed UK small businesses across 9 sectors and 18 cities to study how AI visibility behaves for ordinary businesses over time.

Research questions and analyses are registered before results are known, and we intend to publish findings whether they support our assumptions or not.

Ghostart is for businesses that want to understand and improve how they appear in AI-generated answers. That includes business owners working on their own visibility, marketing teams managing it across a business, and agencies and consultants managing AI visibility for clients.

No. Our standard Starter, Basic and Growth plans cover individuals and teams with different levels of usage.

For larger organisations, or requirements that don’t fit neatly into the standard plans, talk to us about Enterprise.

Yes. Ghostart has a dedicated Agency Plan.

Agencies can run one-off AI visibility reports on businesses they’re pitching, use those findings in new-business conversations and then add the businesses they win to Ghostart for ongoing work.

Treating one AI answer as a ranking.

AI answers vary. One response is an observation, not a permanent position.

Monitoring without acting.

Knowing you’re missing isn’t the same as doing something about it.

Creating content simply because AI makes it cheap.

More generic content isn’t necessarily more useful content.

Looking only at your own website.

Information elsewhere can also contribute to how your business is understood and surfaced.

Abandoning SEO.

Search still matters, and many of the fundamentals overlap.

Looking for a guaranteed GEO formula.

There isn’t one, and nobody can guarantee that an independent AI platform will recommend a particular business.