You have five minutes in a leadership meeting to explain why the company should care about AI search and what you need to do about it. Here is a script, with the reasoning behind each part, so you can adjust it to your own numbers and your own CEO.
Minute one: what changed
"A growing share of our buyers now ask an AI assistant instead of searching. They type 'what is the best X for Y' into ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode and get a short answer that names three or four companies. If we are not one of those names, the buyer never sees us. There is no page two."
Keep it this short. Do not explain how language models work. The CEO needs the shape of the change: a shortlist replaces a results page, and the shortlist is small.
Show one real example. Type a buyer's actual question into an engine in front of them. Nothing you say will land as hard as watching a competitor get named and you not.
Minute two: where we stand
"We ran 30 of our buyers' most common questions across the main engines. We were named in X of them. Our top competitor was named in Y. When engines did name us, they cited these sources."
This requires doing the measurement before the meeting. A baseline number turns a vague concern into a tracked metric. If the number is zero, say zero. A bad baseline is a better argument than a good guess.
Minute three: why we are or are not showing up
Pick the one or two biggest reasons from your audit. Common ones:
- "Our site blocks the AI crawlers, so they cannot read our pages at all."
- "Our product pages load their content with JavaScript, and the crawlers tend not to run it, so they see empty pages."
- "Our pages are written to persuade, not to be quoted. The engines pull from pages that state facts plainly."
- "The engines are citing Reddit and review sites, and we have almost no presence there."
Say which applies and stop.
Minute four: what it costs and what it does not
"The first fixes are technical and mostly one-time. After that it is content written to be quoted and presence in the sources engines read. This is not ad spend. There is no paid placement in these answers, and anyone who sells one is selling something that will not hold."
Then the ask, in one line: "I need X developer days this quarter, Y hours a week from someone who knows the product to write and review content, and sign-off to run a weekly measurement."
Give a number. CEOs say yes to numbers and no to "resources."
Minute five: how we will know it worked
"The metric is share of answer: of our 30 buyer questions, how many name us, measured weekly. Today it is X. I will report it every week. If it has not moved in a quarter, the plan is wrong and we will change it."
This is the sentence that gets the budget approved, because it tells the CEO how to fire the plan if it fails.
What to leave out
Do not use the acronyms. GEO, AEO, and LLM visibility mean nothing in the room. Say "AI search" or "AI answers."
Do not promise a ranking. There are no rankings. Promise a measured number and a cadence.
Do not compare it to SEO at length. One sentence is fine: "it is related to SEO, but the engines read different things and reward different pages."
Do not oversell the size. If you do not know what share of your buyers use AI engines, say so, and say the cost of finding out is small.
If you get a follow-up question
"Why are competitors showing up and we are not?" Usually because their facts are stated more plainly and in more places. Rarely because of anything clever.
"Can we just pay for it?" No. Not in a way that lasts.
"Who owns this?" Name one person. If it is split across SEO, content, and engineering, it will not get done.
Before the meeting
Run the baseline. Run the technical checks. Bring one live example and one number. At AEO GEO Labs this five-minute brief is the first deliverable of an audit, because the work does not start until leadership has seen the number. The free checkers from AEO GEO Labs will give you the crawler, rendering, and schema findings for minute three in an afternoon.