Visibility in search engines and in answer engines: the high-funnel presidium of awareness and consideration, across two distinct surfaces: the site and external sources.
The disciplines cover the same objective — making the brand exist in searches and in answers — but operate on different sources and logics. We manage them with specialist approaches, using BIKMA, the AI Visibility platform developed with the University of Pisa and available as a platform on bikma.ai.
For fifteen years SEO has been, effectively, the discipline of those competing on Google. Today a growing share of brand discovery goes through generative models that produce answers without a click. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude synthesise information from dozens of sources and present it in complete form. Your brand appears in those answers, or it doesn’t, regardless of your Google ranking.
This doesn’t make traditional SEO less important: Google’s volumes remain huge and the technical fundamentals matter today as much as five years ago.
It means SEO must be flanked by a parallel discipline — Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization — for visibility in answer engines. Content that ranks on search engines is often not the source used by models: GEO requires an analysis that goes beyond the site — knowledge graph, third-party sources, citations, external editorial authority.
Most agencies treat GEO as an extension of SEO. We follow the two areas with result-driven approaches, often with distinct operational actions.
Site architecture, performance and Core Web Vitals, indexability, crawl budget, schema.org and structured data, JavaScript rendering management, log data and server-side analysis. The foundation most sub-enterprise agencies don’t really handle in depth.
Topic strategy based on explicit and latent demand, operational content briefs for the client’s editorial team, optimisation of existing content, editorial calendar oriented to SEO/GEO. Direct integration with our in-house Content Creation team.
Domain authority acquisition strategy, targeted digital PR, link profile management. Generative engines favour third-party sources over the brand site: external editorial authority is a direct lever of AI visibility, not just of ranking. We work with a network of tier-1 Italian and international publishers.
Brand visibility in answer engines. Measurement and management through the BIKMA modules: Question Analysis, Share of Voice, External Sources, Sentiment, Fact Checking. It’s the operational arm that leans entirely on the platform.
Architectural strategy ccTLD vs subdirectory, standardisation of technical best practices across local markets, hreflang and geotargeting control, shared KPIs for per-country performance comparison, data visualisation for HQ. For GEO we use native-language prompts per market, not translated, and data stored in the EU. It’s the domain where we most often work with enterprise clients: Bayer, Lactalis, Loro Piana, Pirelli all work on multi-country perimeters.
We don’t work on opinion, we don’t work on templates. Every SEO/GEO project starts with a BIKMA measurement and closes with a BIKMA measurement. In between there’s execution.
We open with a BIKMA measurement of the scope: the five modules on the domain we care about. You can start on your own from the free trial of the platform at bikma.ai, or with a full BIKMA measurement as part of the managed project.
Based on the assessment we build the plan: where traditional SEO is needed, where GEO/AEO is needed, where content is needed, where authority is needed, and in which order. The plan is discussed in workshop with the client’s team.
The consultant who signed the plan executes it, with the support of Fortop’s specialist business units. No rotating account managers, no handovers.
BIKMA runs on your domain continuously, with data accessible in real time also to your internal team.
Concise monthly reporting, strategic quarterly governance, annual plan redesign. The platform generates the reports; the senior consultant adds the interpretation.
+35%
Organic traffic growth
15→30%
Share of Voice in AI engines
> 90%
Fact Alignment
These are orders of magnitude, not guarantees: the exact dynamic depends on the starting point and the discipline of the work.
BIKMA platform, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, Screaming Frog and Sitebulb for technical audits, server-side Tag Manager and GA4 enterprise, direct integrations with corporate CMSes, Semrush and DataForSEO for market benchmarks.
We’re the right partner if your company has an enterprise scope — multi-country, multi-brand, multi-stakeholder — and is looking for a single partner to manage SEO, GEO and AEO end-to-end, under one governance.
We’re the right partner if you operate in a regulated sector (pharma, food, finance) where fact alignment in AI models is not a marketing opportunity but a reputational risk.
Those who instead want only the measurement, to manage with their own team or their agency, find in the self-serve platform at bikma.ai the right path.