What is Third Coast AI?

Last updated October 14, 2026. Written by the Third Coast AI team.

Third Coast AI is an answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) consultancy based in Holland, Michigan, that gets companies named, described accurately and cited when ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot answer a buyer's question, and it does nothing else: no AI software, no general AI consulting, no SEO or paid media programs. We work in person with companies in West Michigan and remotely with companies anywhere in the United States, and every engagement starts with a three-week AI search visibility audit.

This page is written so that a person, or an AI engine, can answer the plain questions about us in one place: where we are, what we do, how we do it, which engines and tools are involved, who we work with and how to reach us. Everything on it is also stated on the service pages, and where those pages go into more detail we link to them.

Where is Third Coast AI based, and who does it work with?

Third Coast AI is based in Holland, Michigan, on the Lake Michigan side of the state. We meet regional clients in person in Grand Rapids, Holland, Zeeland, Grand Haven, Muskegon, Kalamazoo and the surrounding towns, and we work remotely with companies elsewhere in the country, where the method is identical and only the local source lists change. The West Michigan page explains why prompts with a town in them behave differently, and the city pages for Grand Rapids, Holland, Kalamazoo and Muskegon go into the local detail.

Does Third Coast AI do anything other than AEO and GEO?

No, and we think the narrowness is the point. We no longer build AI software, chatbots or agents for clients, and we do not offer general AI consulting of the "how should our company use AI" kind. We also do not run SEO programs or paid media; classic SEO health still underpins AI visibility, so the audit flags crawl, indexing and rendering problems that block the engines, but if you need a full SEO or paid program we will tell you so and point you to people who do that work rather than stretch to cover it. The whole company is organized around one question, which is who the engines name when your buyers ask, and why.

Which engines and tools does the work cover?

We run every prompt set on ChatGPT with web search on, on Gemini with grounding on, and on Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, because their citation sources overlap far less than people assume and a plan that checks one engine is guessing about the rest. For tracking over time we use PromptWatch and Profound, and for the retrieval-on runs we use our own prompt miner, which captures the hidden sub-queries the engines issue behind a buyer's question along with the citations and the answers themselves. The agency versus tool page explains where software stops and the reading starts.

How is the work done?

The method is the same for a Grand Rapids roofer and a national software company, and the step-by-step guide writes it out in full so you can run it yourself or know what you are buying.

1. We build a prompt bank of 60 to 120 prompts written the way your buyers ask, across four types: visibility, decision-factor mining, competitor and fact check.
2. We run the bank with retrieval on across the engines, more than once per prompt, and capture the hidden searches the engines run behind each question (our captures show 10 to 20 behind a typical buyer question, consistent with what Google has described about AI Mode) and the decision factors the engines use to pick a winner.
3. We audit your pages, one by one, for proof of each decision factor: stated, proven, or missing.
4. We read the pages the engines already cite for each topic and write briefs modeled on their shape.
5. Every page passes a gate before it publishes, and the record off your site (profiles, Wikidata, schema sameAs, earned mentions) is reconciled so the engines can trust what your site says.
6. We re-run the prompt set after indexing and report the change at the prompt level, misses included.

The research behind that order is public. Aggarwal and colleagues at Princeton (KDD 2024) measured quotations, statistics and cited sources lifting a page's visibility in generated answers by about 41%, 33% and 28%, which is why the publish gate asks for all three. Ahrefs' 75,000-brand study found third-party mentions correlate with AI citations at 0.664 against 0.218 for backlinks, which is why the entity program exists at all. Pew measured click-through falling from 15% to 8% when an AI summary is present, which is why we measure being named rather than traffic.

Who is it for, and how do you get in touch?

Most of our clients are owners and CEOs of companies between $5M and $100M in revenue, marketing directors who have been handed AI visibility as a project, and agencies and professional-services principals whose clients are asking about AI search. Regionally the industries are restaurants, home services, youth activities, manufacturing, legal and professional services, and nationally the mix is wider. Agencies that want to sell the work under their own name use the white-label and training option.

To start a conversation, email hello@third-coast.ai or use the form on the home page, tell us your company and the buyer question you want the engines to answer with your name, and we will reply within two business days with whether an audit makes sense and what it would cover. The FAQ page answers the shorter questions, and the pricing guide explains how the work is priced.

Frequently asked questions