Frequently Asked Questions
About Jarred Smith, the book Explainable, Answer Engine Optimization, Generative Engine Optimization, and working together.
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Jarred Smith is a marketing leader with nearly 20 years of experience and the best-selling author of Explainable: Why AI Recommends Some Brands & Ignores Others. He specializes in Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and helping brands become visible in AI-driven search. He is currently Director of Marketing at Alliance Technical Group and is available for consulting, speaking, and workshops on AI brand visibility.
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Jarred has spent nearly two decades working across healthcare, public media, retail, and environmental services. He has served as VP of Marketing at OETA (Oklahoma's PBS affiliate), CMO at a healthcare provider, and held digital marketing leadership roles at Love's Travel Stops. Today he leads marketing for Alliance Technical Group, a large environmental services company with over 2,200 employees and 60+ offices across the United States and Canada.
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You can reach Jarred by email at jarred@jarredsmith.com or through the contact form on jarredsmith.com. He is available for consulting, speaking engagements, and workshops on AEO, GEO, and AI brand visibility.
About Jarred Smith
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Explainable: Why AI Recommends Some Brands & Ignores Others is a practical guide to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). It explains how AI systems like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity decide which brands to recommend, why traditional SEO alone is no longer enough, and what marketers can do about it. The book includes step-by-step audits, content frameworks, case studies across B2B, DTC, enterprise, and local businesses, and a measurement framework for when rankings and clicks stop telling the full story.
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Explainable is written for everyday marketers, business owners, and content teams. You don't need to be an AI engineer or a technical SEO specialist. If you are responsible for how your brand shows up online and you've noticed that the rules of visibility are changing, this book gives you the clarity, frameworks, and practical steps to respond. It was built for people who want to understand the next layer of the stack without abandoning what already works.
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Explainable is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback formats. Get the book on Amazon here.
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Yes. Explainable hit #1 New Release in multiple Amazon categories at launch, including Search Engine Optimization, Web Marketing, Online & Internet Searching, and E-Commerce. It has also been a Top 10 Best Seller in SEO, Web Marketing, and Online Internet Searching on Amazon.
About the Book
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Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content so that AI-powered search platforms can find it, understand it, and surface it as a direct answer to user queries. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on ranking pages for keyword-driven clicks, AEO focuses on making your content the cited source in AI-generated responses, featured snippets, voice assistant answers, and zero-click search results. It requires clear, direct answers paired with structured data that makes it easy for machines to extract and reference your content.
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Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the discipline of optimizing your brand's visibility within AI-generated answers across platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. While AEO focuses on being the answer to a specific question, GEO is broader. It encompasses how AI models understand your brand identity, authority, and relevance across every surface they pull from, including your website, social profiles, reviews, press mentions, and industry directories. GEO was formally introduced as a concept in a 2024 research paper from Princeton and IIT Delhi.
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They are sequential, not competing. SEO optimizes your content to rank in traditional search engine results. AEO optimizes your content to be surfaced as a direct answer in featured snippets, voice search, and AI Overviews. GEO optimizes your brand's entire digital presence to be understood, trusted, and cited by generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity. You need all three working together. SEO builds the foundation, AEO structures your content for extraction, and GEO ensures AI systems form an accurate, favorable understanding of your brand.
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No. SEO is not dead, but it is no longer sufficient on its own. Traditional SEO still matters because it drives indexing, builds domain authority, and helps your content get discovered by the crawlers that feed AI systems. But search engines no longer just point people to answers — they decide what the answer is. That means you also need AEO to structure your content for direct answers and GEO to ensure AI platforms form an accurate understanding of your brand. SEO, AEO, and GEO are sequential layers of the same strategy.
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Most organizations begin seeing initial improvements in AI visibility within 30 to 90 days of focused work, particularly on high-intent queries where they already have some authority. Deeper results — consistent AI citations, improved brand descriptions across platforms, and measurable shifts in how AI systems talk about your brand — typically develop over three to six months. The timeline depends on your current content quality, the consistency of your brand signals across the web, and how competitive your category is.
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Yes. In many ways, AEO and GEO level the playing field. AI systems don't rank brands by advertising budget or company size — they prioritize clarity, consistency, and authority. A small business with a well-structured website, consistent brand descriptions, real customer reviews, and content that directly answers its audience's questions can outperform larger competitors who have fragmented or outdated online presences.
AEO, GEO & SEO
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AI systems recommend brands based on how well they can understand, trust, and explain them. They synthesize information from your website, third-party sources, reviews, social profiles, directories, and press coverage. Brands that are described consistently, clearly, and authoritatively across these surfaces are more likely to be cited. Brands with fragmented, outdated, or contradictory information are more likely to be ignored — regardless of how well-known they are in their market.
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If your brand is invisible in AI-generated answers, it's usually not a quality problem — it's a clarity problem. AI systems need to understand who you are, what you do, and why you are a credible source. The most common reasons brands get overlooked include inconsistent descriptions across web properties, content that doesn't directly answer the questions your audience is asking, weak or missing structured data, and a lack of third-party signals like reviews, press mentions, and citations from authoritative sources.
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A GEO visibility audit evaluates how AI systems currently perceive and describe your brand. It involves querying platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Claude with questions your customers would ask, then analyzing whether your brand appears in the responses, how accurately it's described, and where the gaps are. It also examines the consistency of your brand description across all online surfaces — your website, social profiles, directories, press releases, and partner listings — because AI systems synthesize information from all of these sources to form their understanding.
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A coherence audit checks whether every online surface where your brand is described tells the same story. This includes your website, LinkedIn page, Google Business Profile, industry directories, press releases, and partner listings. When these surfaces are inconsistent — using different language, outdated descriptions, or conflicting information — AI systems struggle to form a stable understanding of your brand, which reduces your chances of being recommended. Coherence is one of the most underestimated factors in AI brand visibility.
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The AI Brand Visibility Analyzer is a free tool available at jarredsmith.com that helps marketers assess how visible their brand is in AI-driven search. It provides a starting point for understanding whether AI systems can accurately describe your brand and where the biggest opportunities for improvement are.
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The most common mistakes include treating AEO and GEO as separate from their existing SEO strategy instead of building on top of it, publishing high volumes of generic content that dilutes their brand signal, ignoring the consistency of their brand description across third-party platforms and directories, failing to structure content with clear question-and-answer patterns that AI can extract, and measuring success only through traditional metrics like rankings and clicks while missing AI-specific indicators like citation frequency and brand mention accuracy.
AI Brand Visibility
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Jarred works directly with marketing teams and leadership to diagnose where their brand stands in AI-driven search and build a plan to improve it. Consulting typically starts with a GEO visibility check, a coherence audit across your digital channels, and a content assessment. From there, he builds a tailored 90-day action plan based on your team, your category, and your resources. It's not about buying tools or chasing trends — it's about getting clear on who you are and making sure the machines know it too.
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Yes. Jarred speaks at conferences, corporate events, and industry gatherings on how AI is reshaping brand discovery. His talks are built for marketers, not engineers, and focus on practical steps audiences can act on immediately. Topics include why AI recommends some brands and ignores others, the shift from ten blue links to AI-generated answers, how SEO, AEO, and GEO work together, measurement strategies when clicks disappear, and why publishing more content can actually make brands less visible.
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Jarred runs half-day and full-day workshops that walk marketing, content, and leadership teams through the frameworks in Explainable, applied directly to their brand. Participants run the audits together, identify gaps in their AI visibility, and build an action plan in the room. These sessions are especially valuable for organizations going through transitions like post-acquisition integration, rebrands, or strategic pivots — where getting internal alignment is the hardest and most important part.