AI Search 101
AI Search 101
AI Search 101 is a reference set covering how language models find, read and describe companies. It defines the terms behind AI search, from large language models and generative AI through to answer engine optimisation and AI citations, and explains what each one changes for a business that sells to other businesses.
Buyers increasingly ask a language model what a company does rather than typing a query and reading a list of links. The answer they get is composed rather than retrieved, which means the mechanics matter in a way they did not when the output was ten blue links. These pages explain the mechanics.
Each page answers one question, defines one term, and says what it changes commercially. They are written to be read in any order and are linked to each other where the concepts connect.
AI search and visibility
The pages that matter most if the question is whether buyers can find a company through AI.
| What is AI search? | Search that returns a composed answer rather than a list of links. |
| What is answer engine optimisation? | The practice of making a company legible and quotable to systems that answer rather than rank. |
| What are AI Overviews? | Google's generated summaries above the traditional results. |
| What is an AI citation? | A named source in a generated answer, and why brand mentions matter more than links. |
The technology underneath
What the systems actually are, for anyone who needs to hold the conversation with a technical team.
| What is a large language model? | The model type behind ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. |
| What is generative AI? | Systems that produce new text, images, audio or video. |
| What is ChatGPT? | The assistant that made all of this a mainstream question. |
| What is agentic AI? | Systems that take actions rather than only produce answers. |
| What is prompt engineering? | Writing instructions that produce a usable result. |
Foundations
The older vocabulary that the newer vocabulary is built on.
| What is artificial intelligence? | The field, and why the definition keeps moving. |
| What is machine learning? | Learning patterns from data rather than following written rules. |
| What is a neural network? | The structure most modern systems are built from. |
| What is deep learning? | Neural networks with many layers, and what the depth buys. |
| Strong and narrow AI | The distinction most confused claims depend on. |
| What is the Turing test? | The original benchmark, and why it stopped being the benchmark. |
| What is the technological singularity? | The idea behind most AGI timeline arguments. |
Applied
| AI in marketing | Where AI is actually used in marketing work, and where it is not. |
| Does ChatGPT work in Finnish? | How well language models handle smaller languages, and what that costs. |
How this impacts your business
A language model does not look a company up in a register. It composes a description from everything it read during training and whatever it retrieves at the moment of the question. Trade press, directories, forums, competitor comparison pages, and somewhere in that mix the company's own website too.
So the description a buyer sees is assembled, not published. No company controls it, but every company supplies a share of the material it is built from.
The traffic impact is still small, roughly one percent of sessions for most companies. The influence is not small, because the reader is often a buyer forming a first impression of what a company does and who it serves, before any page gets a click.
Checking takes ten seconds. Type the company name into ChatGPT and read the answer.
Frequently asked questions
What is AI search in simple terms?
Asking a question of a system that reads across many sources and writes one answer, instead of returning a ranked list of pages for the reader to sort through.
Is AI search replacing Google?
Not replacing it. Google itself now generates answers above its own results, and assistants like ChatGPT handle a growing share of the questions people used to type into a search box.
Does traditional SEO still matter?
Yes. Most AI systems retrieve from the open web, so the pages that rank are frequently the pages that get read and cited. The difference is what happens after retrieval, which is where answer engine optimisation applies.
Where should someone start?
With what AI search is, then answer engine optimisation. The rest of the set fills in the vocabulary.
Written by Lari Numminen, Generate More. Also available in Finnish. Updated 31 August 2026.