“AI SEO” means three different things, and two of them are not what the buyer usually has in mind. Sorting out which one is being sold is the first job.
Kunzum does the second of the three, only in crypto. This page exists mainly to make the distinction, because a proposal that blurs them is hard to evaluate and easy to overpay for.
In short
- The term covers content production with AI, visibility inside AI answers, and plain SEO relabelled.
- Only the middle one is a genuinely new discipline with new measurement.
- Ask which one a proposal means before comparing prices between agencies.
- Google has published that no special markup is needed for AI Overviews, which rules out a common line item.
- Kunzum does the middle one, crypto only, and publishes the measurement.
The three meanings
| “AI SEO” can mean | What it actually is | Worth paying for? |
|---|---|---|
| Using AI to produce SEO content | Generating pages faster with a model | Sometimes — but it is a production cost saving, not a visibility strategy |
| Optimising to appear in AI answers | AEO or GEO: being cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, AI Overviews | Yes, if your buyers have moved there and you can measure it |
| Ordinary SEO, rebranded | The same technical and content work with a new label | Only at the old price |
The reason this matters commercially: the three have completely different success measures. Production speed is measured in output, ordinary SEO in rankings and sessions, and AI answer visibility in whether an engine names you when asked — which no analytics package records. An agency quoting one price across all three is not measuring any of them.
What changes when buyers ask instead of search
Kunzum measured this directly rather than assuming it. Across 1,500 responses in September 2026, engines produced 12,518 citations from 1,396 domains — and the single most-cited domain across both editions was reddit.com, at 990. In edition one, editorial press accounted for 26 citations out of 3,987.
Retrieval is also not guaranteed: ChatGPT ran a web search on 54% of its answers and Claude on 65%. That single fact rules out most of what gets promised under this heading, and it is why the SEO comparison concludes that neither replaces the other.
What Kunzum can show you
If a proposal claims AI visibility, ask what it measured. Here is Kunzum's answer, published before any engagement.
1,500 AI responses, published raw. 480 in the Crypto AI Visibility Index and 1,020 in the Crypto Card Report, across four engines and nine markets, with every scoring script included. Under CC BY 4.0, no email gate, no login.
12,518 citations logged across 1,396 domains. Including which engine cited what, so claims about where these systems read are checkable rather than asserted.
Published failures. Edition one registered six hypotheses before any call was made and two failed outright, including the one the study was built around. Both are printed at full size.
A finding against commercial interest. The same corpus found AI warnings about crypto are more accurate than warnings about traditional finance — not the result a crypto marketing studio would have chosen.
All of it is here, and the datasets are downloadable.
What no agency can promise
In Kunzum's own index, ChatGPT ran a web search on 54% of its answers and Claude on 65%. The remainder came from training data, which nothing published afterwards can reach. Any guarantee of placement in AI answers is a guarantee over something the seller does not control.
Engines also vary between runs on the same day, which is why Kunzum's research runs every prompt three times and why no claim here rests on a single reply. And Liu, Zhang and Liang’s work on verifiability found engines frequently state things their own citations do not support, so being cited is not the same as being described accurately.
If you are not in crypto
Kunzum will not be a fit, and there is no version of this page that pretends otherwise. The five questions for qualifying any AEO agency are the useful part to take elsewhere.
If you are in crypto: the crypto-specific page, and five firms compared, Kunzum included and not flattered.
Sources
- Google Search Central, “AI features and your website”. Google. Checked 2026-09-12.
- OpenAI’s crawler documentation. OpenAI. Checked 2026-09-12.
- Aggarwal and colleagues, “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” (2023). arXiv:2311.09735. Checked 2026-09-12.
- Liu, Zhang and Liang, “Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines” (2023). arXiv:2304.09848. Checked 2026-09-12.
Published 2026-09-12. Written by Narender Charan, who runs Kunzum.