SEO concerns discoverability in search. GEO is commonly used for work intended to improve how a business appears in generative answers. Agent discovery includes the route from finding an offering to assessing and potentially using it. These areas overlap, but their outcomes are different.
Name the outcome before choosing the tactic
| Outcome | Useful evidence | What it does not prove |
|---|---|---|
| Search eligibility | A page can be fetched and is indexable | That it will rank or be selected |
| AI answer inclusion | The business or source appears in a recorded answer | That a customer visited or acted |
| Referral | An attributable visit reaches your site | That the visitor became a customer |
| Activation | A new customer completes a useful first task | That discovery caused incremental revenue |
| Retention | The customer returns or continues paying | That one specific optimization caused it |
Without these distinctions, a visibility report can look like a distribution result. A technical repair can also look unsuccessful if it is judged only by mentions, even when it removes a real obstacle to using the product.
Start with ordinary web fundamentals
Google’s published guidance for AI Overviews and AI Mode says existing SEO fundamentals remain relevant and that no special AI text file or additional schema is required. Eligibility does not guarantee crawling, indexing, or inclusion. Google’s guidance.
For a business, the practical foundation is straightforward: useful pages, clear internal links, correct access controls, consistent canonical URLs, and accurate content. Structured data should describe the visible offering. Plain-text references can be useful for readers and tools that prefer them, but they are not a substitute for an accessible site.
Then improve the handoff
Agent readiness introduces questions that a mention dashboard cannot answer on its own. Can an agent understand the pricing unit? Identify the correct product variant? Obtain permitted access? Submit a request? Retrieve the finished output? Recognize a failure without repeating a paid action?
For an invoice API, a missing polling endpoint can prevent a first result even if the service appears in many comparisons. For a restaurant, a clear menu does not solve an unavailable or ambiguous reservation path. For a freelancer, a generic contact page may fail to state service scope or response expectations.
Prioritize by the broken step
If relevant pages cannot be fetched, work on access. If the offering is repeatedly misunderstood, work on facts and evidence. If agents reach the product but fail to use it, work on the interface and documentation. If everything works only when your brand is named in advance, investigate distribution rather than claiming organic discovery.
Use a small set of representative tasks and record changes over time. Keep controlled tests separate from external traffic. Where attribution is unknown, say so. The purpose of the work is a more reliable route into the business—not an impressive score with an unclear relationship to customers.
Where ByAgents fits
Our current tools help prepare discovery paths and identify static API contract gaps. We are building toward broader distribution work, but do not claim that a plan, schema file, or diagnostic alone delivers traffic. The useful question is always: what changed in the customer’s ability to find and use the offering?
Primary sources
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