Search Scope is a Perth-based SEO consultancy providing AI SEO, Generative Engine Optimisation and Answer Engine Optimisation services to businesses in Perth and across Australia. Search Scope was founded in 2021 by Dorian Menard, a Perth SEO consultant specialising in search since 2013.
Your competitor gets named in the answer. You do not appear at all. That is the whole difference, and it is decided before a Perth buyer ever sees a list of links. When a Perth buyer asks AI who to hire, you want to be the answer.
Every engagement is run by Dorian directly, never passed to an account manager.
30 minutes. We run your buyer questions live across four AI platforms. No proposal at the end unless you ask.
AI SEO in Perth is the work of getting a Perth business named and recommended inside AI-generated answers, across Google AI Overviews, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and other answer engines. It combines conventional SEO with entity clarity, content structured so a passage can be lifted whole, third-party citations, Google Business Profile strength and local reputation signals. The aim is not to rank a page and hope for a click, but to be one of the few sources an AI names when a Perth customer asks it who to use.
Also called AI search optimisation or generative engine optimisation (GEO).
Local is the part most AI SEO advice skips. An answer to a Perth query gets assembled from 4 things: your website, your Google Business Profile, your reviews and Maps presence, and the Perth sites that mention you. Fix the website alone and you have addressed one of them.
A Perth buyer no longer types 10 keywords and scrolls a search engine results page (SERP). They ask ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews or Gemini a full question, and the large language model (LLM) behind it hands back a short list of 2 or 3 businesses to start with. If your competitor is named and you are not, you never entered the shortlist, no matter how well your site ranks in the old blue links.
Local makes this harder, not easier. AI answers for a Perth query weigh your Google Business Profile, local reviews, Maps presence and Perth-specific citations alongside your website. It is the same groundwork behind a strong local SEO in Perth campaign, which is why AI visibility works best layered on that foundation rather than bolted on alone. We work all of it together, so the model has every reason to treat you as the obvious local answer. Chasing national AI SEO with no local signal is exactly why most Perth businesses stay invisible.
Not sure where your Perth business stands? The free AI Visibility Scanner checks whether 4 engines name you, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity, in about 2 minutes, then shows the gaps to close first.
AI SEO (generative engine optimisation) gets your business cited inside AI answers; traditional SEO gets a page ranked in Google's results. In 2026 a Perth business needs both, because strong rankings still feed the models the signals they trust. Here is how the two compare side by side.
| Dimension | AI SEO (GEO) | Traditional SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Get your business named inside the AI answer | Rank a page in the blue-link results |
| Where you appear | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude | Google page one, Maps pack |
| Primary signals | Quotable content, citations, entity clarity, GBP strength | Backlinks, on-page relevance, technical health |
| Success metric | Citation share: how often AI names you | Keyword position + organic clicks |
| Typical first result | ≈90 days on an established domain, 6–9 months on a new one | 3–6 months to move competitive terms |
| Best for | Perth buyers who ask AI a full question first | Buyers who still search and scroll |
The short version: traditional SEO earns the click, AI SEO earns the mention that happens before the click. We run both together, so the same Perth business shows up whether a buyer scrolls or asks.
Generative Engine Optimisation is the work of becoming the source an AI answer draws on, and the name it puts forward. In Perth that adds a local layer: your Google Business Profile, your reviews and the WA sites that mention you, because a Perth answer is assembled from those as much as from your website.
One caution on the abbreviation. GEO here means generative engine optimisation, not the geo-grid rank tracking that shares the letters. We do both. They are different jobs.
The full definition, including how GEO differs from AEO
In September 2026 Search Scope recorded 2,400 AI answers from Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT and Gemini across 20 Perth industries, plumbers to family lawyers, and 600 Google Maps captures to compare them against. Most recommendations changed between days. Underneath that, 3 patterns held. The full report, method and dataset are published on AI SEO Perth, our research publication. These are associations observed in one Perth dataset over three days, not proof that any lever works.
of the most persistently recommended businesses sat in Google’s organic top 10
Of the businesses recommended across three or four AI systems, 52% sat in the Google organic top 10 for the same question. Of businesses never recommended, 1.5% did. Organic presence was the only factor, with review volume, still associated at that most persistent level.
See the evidenceAI Overview picks appeared nowhere in the AI Mode answer to the same question
Seven in ten businesses named by an AI Overview appeared nowhere in the AI Mode answer to the identical question. AI Overview picks leaned on organic rankings; AI Mode picks leaned on Maps. That held in all 20 industries, so a Perth business can be visible in one Google AI surface and absent from the other.
See the evidencemedian star rating, identical at every level of visibility
Being listed on the directories these systems cite went with being recommended at least once. It showed no association with being recommended repeatedly across platforms. Review volume did, and star rating did not: the median rating was 4.90 at every level of visibility.
See the evidenceSearch Scope is an SEO agency and "SEO agency" was 1 of the 20 industries measured. Search Scope does not appear in the top 40 recommended businesses on any of the 4 platforms. That is stated on the report and it is stated here.
There is no single AI to game. A Perth query gets answered from a different index and a different set of signals on each platform, so AI SEO Perth means a different job on each. Here are the 3 engine families we focus on, in plain terms.
Most "who should I use in Perth" queries route through Google AI Overviews or Gemini, so this is the engine we prioritise first for a Perth client. Earning a citation here still starts with ranking respectably in classic Google results for your suburb and service, then formatting content so a clean passage can be lifted straight into the answer, then building links: either a mention in the sources Google is already pulling for that Perth query, or a dedicated asset that targets it directly.
OpenAI documents that ChatGPT search "sometimes partners with other search providers", and does not name them for consumer ChatGPT. An agency that tells you exactly which search engine ChatGPT runs on is telling you more than OpenAI has published. What OpenAI does name is the entry requirement: allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl the site, and allow its published searchbot IP ranges. Block either and a Perth business cannot appear at all. AI SEO Perth here means that access check first. Then topical authority around your service area, so the model treats you as a known local entity. Then the fan-out: the sub-questions ("how much does it cost in Perth", "best suburb for") the model expands one prompt into before answering.
Source: OpenAI Help Center, Searching the web with ChatGPT. Read 8 September 2026.
Anthropic documents what Claude does: it decides when to search, runs the searches, and answers with citations. It names no underlying search provider. Brave says its Search API supplies "most of the top 10 AI LLMs" and is the only index behind some of their answers, but names none of them. So nobody outside those 2 companies can tell a Perth business which index answers a Claude query, and we do not pretend to. AI SEO Perth for Claude is the work that holds up either way: pages that crawl cleanly, unambiguous entity signals, and third-party corroboration. That is also what earns visibility inside Brave’s own index.
Source: Anthropic web search tool documentation, and Brave’s Search API blog. Read 8 September 2026.
Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and the rest each pull from their own retrieval layer too, and we track those for Perth clients. Copilot is the exception where the plumbing is not in doubt. Microsoft owns both it and Bing, so ranking in Bing is a documented route into Copilot answers, and Bing Webmaster Tools reports those citations back to you. The point is simple: one generic "AI SEO" tactic does not cover all of them, and where a vendor has not published how its retrieval works, the honest answer is to say so and do the work that holds up either way. For the underlying retrieval mechanics, read how AI search works.
Worth knowing before you pick a lane: here's the freshest monthly active user data we could verify for the AI platforms your Perth customers are asking, each figure sourced, not guessed.
| Platform | Scale | As of | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 1.0B monthly active app users estimate | May 2026 | Sensor Tower, reported by Reuters |
| Google Gemini | 1B+ monthly active users disclosed | 11 Aug 2026 | Sundar Pichai; Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings for the prior figure |
| Claude | ~245M modelled monthly users contested | May 2026 | Sensor Tower State of AI, via secondary reporting |
| Perplexity | 780M queries in the month disclosed | May 2025 | Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity CEO |
Selling to Perth locals, tradies, cafes, retailers, home services, put the budget behind ChatGPT and Google's AI stack first: AI Overviews and Gemini. That's where consumer volume actually sits. ChatGPT answers can be shaped fairly directly with the right content, but AI Overviews and Gemini still reward what classic SEO always has: solid organic Google rankings.
Engineering firms, consultancies, industrial suppliers, anyone selling to other businesses out of Perth should look past the raw numbers above. Claude and Microsoft Copilot reach a smaller, more professional audience making considered decisions, and that's usually the better place to put a B2B visibility budget. Copilot is the practical one to start with, because Microsoft owns it and Bing both, so Bing indexation is a documented route in and Bing Webmaster Tools shows you the citations.
AI citation is earned, not bought. Most established Perth businesses see measurable movement inside 3 months; a new domain takes 6–9. Anyone quoting you AI SEO results in 30 days is selling you something.
Plenty of Perth agencies added "AI SEO" to their homepage in 2025. We have been building the foundations those answers actually reward, local authority, structured data, citations and content that gets referenced, since 2013.
Dorian is Perth-based and has been doing SEO here since 2013. You get someone who knows the local market, the suburbs and the competitors by name, working directly on your account, not a ticket routed to an offshore team.
Domain authority, structured data, clean citations, a citation-led content strategy that other sources reference: these are the exact signals AI engines lean on, and they are what we have been building for local businesses since 2013. Generative engine optimisation in Perth, GEO Perth, did not change the work. It put a name on it.
We open every engagement with a live visibility check on your business across the AI platforms, so you see where a Perth buyer does and does not find you before strategy or pricing comes up. Month-to-month after that. You stay because it works.
Specialising in SEO since 2013. Founder of Search Scope. I work directly with every client on strategy and execution. No account managers, no offshore teams, no templated retainers.
My work covers multi-location and franchise SEO, organic and national SEO, local SEO, Google Maps, GBP and GMC reinstatement, technical audits, and AI search visibility. I work with established businesses and multi-location networks that want a senior specialist, not a service package.
5.0 stars across 38 verified Google reviews. Read on Google Full client review archive
Straight answer: we are not for every Perth business. AI citation is a partnership that compounds, not a plug-in. The strategy call runs 30 minutes, and if we are not the right fit we will say so and point you somewhere that is.
30 minutes. No pitch deck. No proposal at the end unless you ask.
First, the honest bit: for most Perth clients, AI SEO is not a separate purchase. Second, when it is bought on its own, the order matters. Diagnose, fix the foundations once, then pay monthly to hold the ground you take.
Any Perth business that wants the real diagnosis before committing to a program. One-off.
Where you stand on each AI platform separately, what is blocking you, and an honest read on whether Google AI Overviews is realistically reachable for you yet. Credited in full against an Entity Foundation booked within 30 days.
$3,000 for ecommerce and multi-location.
Almost everyone, first. The cleanup that everything else depends on. One-off project.
One canonical set of business facts, corroborated across the sources that decide whether a machine can identify you at all. Priced on how far your footprint has drifted, not on a menu.
$1,950 single location, $3,450 typical, from $5,000 multi-location or catalogue.
Trades, home services, healthcare, legal, mortgage brokers. One suburb or right across the Perth metro.
Ongoing work built around Google Business Profile depth, Perth citations, review velocity and AI-ready service and suburb content. Covers ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, with Google AI Overviews reported rather than targeted.
High-ticket Perth niches where the category is genuinely contested, cosmetic, legal, medical and the like, plus ecommerce catalogues and brands competing beyond the metro.
The program for markets where being cited is worth real money and somebody else already owns the answer. Adds Google AI Overviews where your organic ranking supports it. Scales with catalog size, footprint and how contested the category is.
Most businesses pick a program and leave it there. If yours needs more coverage in one area, add it rather than moving up a tier.
Managed placement is the part of AI SEO Perth that earns you into that trusted set. When an AI answers a question in your category it does not search the whole web. It pulls from a small set of sites it already trusts, and the same handful come up again and again.
So the first job is working out which ones those are for your questions. Then we get your business onto them, either added to the exact page the AI is already quoting or onto a new page on the same site. You are not building new authority from scratch, you are borrowing authority that already exists, which is why this is usually the fastest thing that moves.
Placement costs are paid to the publisher, not to us. They are invoiced at cost with the supplier invoice attached, and we charge a flat fee for finding and managing each one.
ChatGPT and Perplexity are the more reachable surfaces, because they lean on indexes with weaker filtering and less personalisation than Google's. Claude and Copilot sit in the middle, pull fewer sources per answer so each one carries more weight, and matter most if you sell to other businesses.
Google AI Overviews is the hardest by a distance, and your organic footing feeds it. That is not an absolute. Overviews do cite pages sitting nowhere near page one. But the pattern is consistent enough to plan around: the stronger you rank on a topic, the more often you get summarised. Run AI SEO on a thin foundation and you are working against the odds rather than with them.
That is the one place a specialist AI-only agency has to send you elsewhere and we do not. If the honest answer is that your organic foundation has to come first, we can build that too, and we will tell you on the call rather than sell you a program that cannot land.
A model naming your Perth business is the output of the whole stack, not a setting to switch on. Entity clarity, content it can quote, citations it already trusts and a reputation that reads well are what put you in the answer.
See the whole Trust Stack
A 30-minute AI visibility check with the Perth specialist who'll do the work, not a salesperson. We run your buyer questions live across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude, so you leave knowing exactly where you're invisible and what it takes to get cited.
30 minutes on the calendar. Bring the questions your best customers ask before they buy, and we will run them live across the AI platforms your Perth buyers actually use.
