I built Snakebite because the way people find businesses has changed — and most brands haven’t caught up.
AI search isn’t coming. It’s here. And the brands that get structured for it now will own the next decade of digital discovery.
The short version
I’m Tyler Hicks. I’ve spent years in digital marketing — building campaigns, optimizing funnels, and watching how people actually find and choose businesses online. A few years ago, I noticed something that changed everything I thought I knew about search.
People stopped searching. They started asking.
Instead of typing keywords into Google and clicking through ten blue links, they were opening ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini and asking direct questions. And the AI would just answer. No clicks. No ads. No SERP. Just a direct recommendation.
The brands being recommended weren’t always the ones with the best SEO. They were the ones whose information was structured in a way that AI models could understand, trust, and cite. That gap — between brands that AI recommends and brands that AI ignores — is the entire reason Snakebite exists.
Snakebite is an Answer Engine Optimization agency. We make sure that when AI answers questions about your industry, your market, or your service — your brand is the one it cites.
What we believe
AEO is not a feature of SEO — it’s a different discipline.
The signals that make AI cite your brand are fundamentally different from the signals that rank you on Google. Entity authority, structured data relationships, content citability, and knowledge graph presence matter more than backlink profiles and keyword density. We don’t bolt AEO onto SEO retainers. This is all we do.
The brands that move first will be hardest to displace.
AI models form entity associations and authority signals over time. The businesses that establish themselves as the authoritative source now will have a compounding advantage as these models continue to train and evolve. Waiting is the most expensive strategy.
Data over guesswork. Always.
Every engagement starts with a full AI visibility audit — hundreds of prompts run across every major platform to map exactly where you stand, who’s being cited instead of you, and what it takes to change that. No generic playbooks. No assumptions.
Frequently asked questions
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring your brand’s digital presence so that AI-powered search platforms — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and others — cite, recommend, and accurately describe your business when users ask relevant questions. It focuses on entity optimization, structured data, content citability, and authority signals that AI models use to generate answers.
SEO optimizes your website to rank in traditional search engine results and earn clicks. AEO optimizes your brand’s entire digital footprint to be cited in AI-generated answers. While SEO relies on keywords, backlinks, and page authority, AEO relies on entity relationships, structured data, content that AI can parse and quote, and signals that establish your brand as an authoritative source across knowledge graphs and language models.
Snakebite was founded by Tyler Hicks, a digital marketing specialist who recognized that AI-powered search platforms were fundamentally changing how consumers discover and choose businesses. Snakebite was built to help brands adapt to this shift by optimizing specifically for AI citations and recommendations.
Over one billion people use ChatGPT weekly, and AI Overviews now appear on a significant portion of Google searches. The majority of AI search sessions end without a traditional website click — meaning the AI’s answer is the only impression your brand gets. Brands that aren’t optimized for AI citations are invisible to a rapidly growing segment of their potential customers.