What "AI search optimization" actually covers
AI search optimization is the practice of making a website findable, correctly interpretable, and citable by AI assistants and the AI features now built into search engines — not just ranked by a classic search algorithm.
It sits downstream of traditional SEO. SEO gets a page crawled and ranked. AI search optimization is about what happens after that: whether an AI system that has found your page can actually extract what your business does, where it's located, and how someone can act on that — accurately enough to recommend you by name.
A business can do everything right by classic SEO standards — fast page, clean structure, strong backlinks — and still be functionally invisible to an AI assistant reading the same page, if that page never states its services in a way a machine can parse.