AI SEO for the answers
Google writes.
When Google answers a question directly, it names a few sources and moves on. We find the searches where it answers, names someone else, and never mentions you.
Full Cycle is a development shop that built its own measurement engine, so this page is specific about method and honest about scope. We track one AI surface, not five. Everything below either runs today or is not on this page.
The thing Search Console cannot tell you
Search Console reports the queries you already appear for. That is its design. It has nothing to say about a search where Google produced an AI answer, cited three sources, named a competitor, and left you out entirely — because from your side, nothing happened. No impression, no position, no row in the report.
That absence is the most expensive thing in search right now, and it is invisible in every standard report. Finding it is the first thing we do: for the searches your buyers actually use, we check whether Google writes an answer, whether you are named in it, and which domains it drew from instead.
A common result is that a business is named on searches for its own name, and on none of the searches describing the problem it solves. Those are very different positions, and only one of them wins new customers.
What we measure
For a set of searches that matter to your business, on Google AI Overviews.
Mention rate
How often you are named when Google writes an answer — reported as a range with a 95% confidence interval, never as a bare percentage.
Answer-presence rate
How often Google generates an AI answer for these searches at all. On many commercial queries it still does not, and that is worth knowing before you spend anything.
The sources it used
The domains Google drew the answer from. This is the practical target list: to be in the answer, you generally have to be in the places the answer comes from.
Who it named instead
Which competitors appear in the answers you are absent from, and on which searches.
How it is measured, since that is the whole question
At least three samples per search, spaced about twenty minutes apart. AI answers are non-deterministic. One sample turns a steady 60% into 0% or 100% depending on the day you looked. Samples taken back-to-back tend to return the same answer, which is one measurement counted three times and a confidence interval that is falsely tight — so the spacing is deliberate, not incidental.
Extraction is deterministic. Whether you were mentioned is decided by string and pattern matching, not by asking a language model. If you ever dispute a number, we can show you the exact text that produced it, and it will produce the same result again. An LLM's verdict is not reproducible, so it has no business being the measurement.
A search with no AI answer is its own outcome. It is not a failed request and it is not "you were not mentioned". Folding those three together understates every score, which is why we keep them apart.
Search Console and Bing: the on-page work
This is the older half of what we do, and the one with a real operating history. It runs weekly against live sites — including this one.
Diagnosis comes first, per engine
Before any recommendation, each engine is diagnosed on its own: are you ranking, visible but not ranking, invisible, or decaying? A site is regularly healthy on Google and invisible on Bing, and those two states need opposite work.
This is also how you avoid paying for the wrong thing. If an engine comes back invisible, no amount of rewriting titles will move it — that is an indexation or technical problem, and we will tell you so rather than sell you a content package. If it comes back visible but not ranking, the constraint is authority and internal linking, and on-page copy edits are not the lever either.
Ten analyzers, run against your own search data
Findings come from your Search Console and Bing Webmaster data plus a crawl of the site, not from a generic checklist:
Nothing ships without demand evidence
Every content recommendation passes a demand gate first: if nobody searches for it, it does not reach you, however good an idea it sounds like. We learned this the expensive way on our own properties — pages that ranked genuinely well for terms with no search volume at all.
Specs, then measurement
The output is a specific, page-level change with the evidence attached — what to change, on which page, and why. We then detect whether it was actually applied by re-crawling and diffing, and re-measure on a clock: 30, 60 and 90 days on Google, 14, 30 and 60 on Bing.
Measuring whether the change worked is the part most SEO engagements quietly skip. It is the part we consider the product.
Google Business Profile
For businesses with a local presence, three audits that read the profile as published.
Category audit
Compares your categories against what the local market actually uses — roughly a hundred nearby listings — and reports how many hold each one. It also searches Google's full category vocabulary for categories that match services you offer and that nobody nearby has claimed, plus the services you provide that have no Google category at all. Those suggestions are matched on wording, so they come to you as proposals a human has reviewed — not as an automated verdict, which is the one part of this that a machine should not decide alone.
Services-section audit
Finds what is actually wrong in the services section, quoted exactly as published: entries that are place names rather than services, titles silently truncated by Google's character limit, and service areas claimed there and nowhere else on your profile. These are small, concrete, and fixable in an afternoon — and they are the kind of thing that sits unnoticed for years.
Review language
The words your customers actually use about you, extracted from your own reviews and ranked by frequency. Useful because it is very often not the vocabulary your website uses.
What we don't do
This section exists because everything above is easier to trust once you know where it stops.
Any AI surface other than Google AI Overviews
No ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini or Copilot tracking. Each is a separate data source with separate economics, and a number averaged across surfaces that were measured differently is not a number. We would rather measure one surface defensibly than five badly. If those matter more to you than Google, we are the wrong shop and will say so.
Before-and-after numbers
We will not show you a case-study graph, because we have measured how noisy this ground is: a local visibility grid moved from roughly 3% to 27% on several searches inside a week with no work done on it at all. A before/after with no noise floor under it is weather being sold as climate. You will get baselines, intervals, and a measurement clock instead.
Writing your content
The specs say precisely what to change and why. Your team, who knows your business, writes it. That boundary is deliberate.
Review generation, reputation management, or posting to your profile
We read your reviews and your profile. We do not solicit reviews, manage reputation, or publish on your behalf.
AEO, GEO, AI SEO — a note on the words
Answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) are both used for the same underlying goal: being named and cited when a search engine writes the answer itself instead of listing ten links. AI SEO and AI search optimization are the looser, more common terms for the same work.
The vocabulary is unsettled and largely marketing-driven, so it is worth ignoring the labels and asking any agency a concrete question: which surfaces do you actually query, how many samples per search, and what is the confidence interval? Most of the category cannot answer that.
Our answer is on this page. Google AI Overviews; three samples minimum, spaced; 95% interval; deterministic extraction.
Find out where you stand.
Tell me what your business does and the kind of question a customer would type. I'll tell you honestly whether Google is writing answers for those searches yet, and whether there is anything here worth doing for you. If there isn't, that is a perfectly good outcome and it costs you nothing to hear.