What Is AIO?

We were one of the first, and we don't claim to be the only one. In 2024 and 2025, agencies in several countries were chasing the same question: how does a brand get onto an AI's recommendation list? In July 2025 we had Gemini run a deep research report on exactly that, and its assessment pointed the same way: "world first" is a claim nobody can prove, while "one of the first" holds up.

In Turkey the picture is clear. Türk SEM is the first agency in Turkey to offer this work as a service with a dated, public method. We published that method in the AIO Whitepaper in July 2025, and we haven't found an AIO or GEO methodology published in Turkey before it.

Yes, there are now, and we're not hiding it. In Turkey, other agencies started using the name AIO after us, and agencies abroad use it too; some of them call themselves the first. That comes with the territory: the field is new and the name is free for anyone to use.

Two things are ours. The first is the date: we published our method as a whitepaper in July 2025, and the document is still public. The second is the method itself, a process with defined steps from the question map to measurement, reported the same way every month. Ask any agency you're considering when and where it published its method. The answer should come with a document.

You can download it from the Whitepaper button at the top of this page; it's a public PDF in English and Turkish, published in July 2025. Inside, we set out what makes the approach different. Most AI work in the industry aims to get a brand mentioned in an answer. Ours aims for the recommendation list itself, and the paper describes the route: content structured for an AI to read, authoritative brand content, mentions in trusted publications, and steady monitoring.

The seven-step process on this page is how that method runs in client work today. The week the paper came out, we also asked Gemini and Claude to assess it. Both reports are published unedited, and you'll find them linked in the section on Turkey's first GEO and AIO agency.

No, and we'd be wary of any agency that suggests otherwise. ChatGPT chooses its sources fresh for every answer, and a partner badge doesn't change that, for us or for our clients.

Türk SEM has been an OpenAI Select Partner in the OpenAI Partner Network since October 2026. We see it as a sign of how central AI assistants are to our work, not as a shortcut. Getting recommended still comes down to the fundamentals: a consistent identity, content that answers the question, and mentions in places people trust.

Short version: AIO is the work of getting AI assistants to recommend your brand. When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, "Which company should I use for this?", AIO is the work that shapes whether your name comes up. The letters stand for AI Optimization.

For us it's an umbrella term. GEO (getting cited in the answers of generative engines) falls under it, and so does showing up in Google's AI Overviews, with strategy, measurement and authority building running through all of it. It's been our fourth core service since 2025. Where SEO moves your site up a list of results, AIO aims for a place inside the answer itself, and it builds on SEO rather than replacing it.

To be the brand an AI recommends. That matters because more and more research now happens in ChatGPT or Gemini, where people get one compiled answer instead of ten links, and that answer has room for only a handful of brands.

Picture someone asking, "Which clinic in Istanbul should I go to for LASIK?" A clinic the AI can't find enough consistent information about won't make the list, however good it is. AIO closes that gap, so the system knows who you are, gets the facts right and recommends you with confidence.

Think of them as two floors of the same building. SEO is the ground floor: it gets your site crawled, indexed and ranked. AIO sits on top and works on whether your brand makes it into the answer, and the recommendation, that an AI writes. Without the ground floor there's no second floor: an AI looking for current information turns to a search index, so a site that isn't indexed can't be cited.

What changes upstairs is the scorecard. SEO counts rankings and clicks; AIO counts mentions and recommendations. A results page has ten spots, while an answer often has room for two or three brands. Google's own guidance says optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO, and we agree, which is why our AIO work always starts from SEO.

Close, but GEO is the narrower of the two. GEO means getting cited and recommended when generative engines like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity write an answer, and it's the term most of the industry and academia use. It traces back to a paper a Princeton and IIT Delhi research team posted in November 2023.

AIO is our broader label. It covers GEO plus the work on Google's AI Overviews, measurement and strategy. Our What Is GEO? page goes into GEO in depth.

Yes, and widely so. AI Overviews is the Google product launched in May 2024, the AI summary shown above the search results, and in English-language SEO writing "AIO" usually refers to it.

On this page and in our whitepaper, AIO means AI Optimization, the name of our method. The two uses don't compete: getting into AI Overviews is one branch of that method, and we wrote a full guide to it: Google AI Overviews: What They Are and How to Get Cited.

No. Google's Search Central guide names AEO and GEO, not AIO, and says that optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO. We put AIO inside SEO, not against it; there is no AIO without SEO.

In a separate article, we used Google Trends data to see which of these terms people actually search for. Whatever you call it, the work starts in the same place: a site that can be crawled, read and quoted as an answer.

Because an AI recommends what it can confirm. It works from two sources, the text it was trained on and the pages it trusts when it searches in the moment. A brand that shows up rarely, patchily or inconsistently in either place doesn't make the list. A brand whose site, press coverage and directory listings all tell the same story does.

In practice four things decide it: plain answers on your pages, a consistent identity with real references, a site that can be crawled and indexed, and mentions in places your industry respects. All four matter in SEO too. In AIO a gap is harder to close, because an answer has so little room.

Our work centers on three: ChatGPT (OpenAI), the assistant most people turn to; Gemini (Google), which is tied into Google Search and also powers AI Overviews; and Claude (Anthropic), a common choice for research and writing at work.

They often answer the same question from different sources, so we test each one on its own, and we also track answer engines that show their sources, such as Perplexity. The good news is that the core signals overlap: solid work for one system tends to pay off on the others.

Not overnight, and not on a fixed schedule. Models get updated, competitors are doing the same work, and AI systems pick their sources fresh every day; part of any effect only shows up once a new model version ships. Anyone who promises a fixed timeline or a guarantee is promising something they don't control.

What we can tell you is what we usually see: first results within about 75 days. We document your starting point on day one, then measure the same way every month whether AI systems know your brand and recommend it for your target questions. After that the work keeps running, the way SEO does.

Three things change, roughly in this order. First the numbers: more of your target questions mention you, more of them recommend you, and what the AI says about you gets more accurate. Then the customers: someone who arrives on an AI's recommendation is close to a decision, because the AI has already done the shortlisting.

The third change is slower. Your brand gets better known, and it becomes easier to be seen as a leader in your field. Timing matters here: an answer has little room, so if your competitors haven't started yet, whoever settles in first holds the edge.