What Is AIEO? How Photographers Get Found by AI Search
AIEO (AI engine optimisation) is the work of making your photography business one of the names an AI assistant actually recommends when someone asks it to find a photographer. Where SEO gets you found on Google, AIEO gets you found by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's own AI answers. And I should be upfront: I learned this subject the expensive way. My first attempt at AIEO broke the SEO I'd spent years building. So consider this the guide I needed BEFORE I started fiddling.
(If you haven't read the first post in this series, SEO for photographers tells the full story of the fall and the fix. This one is about the new half of getting found.)
Are clients really asking AI to find photographers?
They are, and it's happening faster than most of us are ready for.
Let me be honest about the scale first: Google is still where most photography searches happen today. But a growing slice of your future clients now type "recommend a family photographer in [town]" into an AI assistant and simply... book whoever it names. No scrolling. No page one. No comparing ten websites over a cup of tea. One answer, a couple of names, done.
Which is both the threat and the opportunity. If the assistant doesn't know you exist, you're not on page two. You're nowhere. But almost no photographers are doing anything about this yet, which means the ones who start now are competing in a nearly empty room.
How is AIEO different from SEO?
They're cousins, not rivals. SEO is about ranking: Google shows a list, and you climb it. AIEO is about being described and recommended: the AI reads whatever it can find about you, forms a picture, and decides whether you're worth naming.
That changes what your website needs to do. Google matches keywords. An AI assistant does something closer to what a helpful friend does: it summarises you. So the question stops being "do I have the right keywords?" and becomes "if a machine read my website, could it describe my business accurately in one sentence?" For a lot of photography websites (all beautiful images, barely any words), the honest answer is no.
How do AI assistants decide which photographer to recommend?
Nobody outside the AI companies knows the full recipe, but the pattern is clear enough to work with, and none of it is technical:
Can it tell what you do and where? The same foundation as SEO: your services and your locations, in plain words, on your pages.
Do the facts agree with each other? AI assistants cross-check. If your website says one thing, your Google Business Profile another and your Instagram bio a third, the machine hedges and recommends someone clearer.
Can it quote someone other than you? Reviews are gold here. AI answers love citing what real clients said, which is why a healthy Google review base quietly works for you in places you'd never think to look.
Do you answer real questions in full sentences? When someone asks an assistant "how much does a family photoshoot cost?", it lifts its answer from pages that answer that question plainly and completely. A wall of poetic copy gives it nothing to lift.
How do I optimise my photography website for AI search?
Here is where I'd start, in order:
Write your one-sentence description and use it everywhere. "[Your name] is a [style] photographer in [place], specialising in [services]." On your homepage, your About page, your Google Business Profile, your bios. Boring? Slightly. Extractable? Completely. This is the sentence you're teaching the machines to repeat.
Add a proper FAQ to your key pages. Real questions, in your clients' words, each with a short self-contained answer. It helps human visitors, it helps Google, and it hands AI assistants ready-made answers with your name attached.
Get your facts consistent. Prices, places, services, even how you describe your experience: matching across your website, your Google profile and your socials. Ten minutes with a cup of tea and every profile open in tabs.
Keep gathering reviews. They're the proof an AI can cite. If you've been meaning to send review requests for months, this is your sign.
Keep your Google SEO healthy. AI tools lean heavily on existing search indexes (some on Bing, which most photographers have never thought about once in their lives). Strong SEO foundations ARE most of strong AIEO. Which brings me to the cautionary tale...
Can AIEO go wrong? (Ask me how I know)
In 2025 I got excited about all of this and rewrote chunks of my website for AI search. Enthusiastically. Without a plan. And without realising it, I stripped out years of load-bearing SEO in the process, right in the middle of a Google-wide re-evaluation. My site fell off page one, my traffic roughly halved, and it took an eight-week back-to-basics rescue plan to put it right. (The full story is in the SEO post, and yes, I now make my own mistake part of the teaching. It's the clearest lesson I own.)
So the rule I follow now, and the one I'd tattoo somewhere visible if you're about to start: AIEO is built on top of your SEO, never instead of it. Change your pages carefully. Batch your edits, publish once, and watch your rankings afterwards. The words on your website are load-bearing. Treat them that way.
Do I need to choose between Google and AI?
No, and please don't. They're two front doors to the same house, and the foundations underneath them are shared: clear words, consistent facts, real trust. Do the work once, properly, and both doors open.
If you'd like that work laid out step by step, my Get Found by AI course (£99, six lessons, none of it technical) teaches exactly this: how to show up in AI search without losing Google, built from doing it wrong first and then doing it right. It's made as a pair with my SEO course, one ending where the other begins, and the two come together in the Finally Found on Google & AI bundle if you want the whole picture. And if you're not ready for a course, my free guides for photographers are yours, no strings.
Your future clients are already asking. Let's make sure the answer includes you.
Good Questions, Honest Answers
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AIEO stands for AI engine optimisation: the work of making a business findable and recommendable in AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers. You'll sometimes see it called GEO (generative engine optimisation); it's the same idea.
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No, but they're closely related. SEO helps a website rank in Google's list of results; AIEO helps a business get accurately described and recommended inside AI-generated answers. The foundations (clear words, consistent facts, real reviews) are shared by both.
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Make your business easy to describe: a clear one-sentence summary of what you do and where, consistent facts across your website and Google Business Profile, genuine client reviews an AI can cite, and real questions answered in full sentences on your pages.
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It can if it's done carelessly: rewriting established pages wholesale can strip out years of SEO, which is exactly what happened to Kirsty Hamilton's own website in 2025. Done properly, AIEO is built on top of healthy SEO rather than in place of it.
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Yes: Get Found by AI (£99) is Kirsty Hamilton's six-lesson course teaching photographers how to show up in AI search without losing Google. It's built as a pair with her SEO Success for Photographers course, and the two are sold together in the Finally Found on Google & AI bundle.