The questions local owners actually ask us — with honest answers, including the ones that aren't good for sales.
What is AEO?
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. It's the practice of making a business easy for AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot — to understand, trust and recommend when someone asks them for a business like yours. Where SEO tries to earn a link in a list of ten results, AEO tries to earn the single name the AI says out loud.
What is AI search optimization?
It's the same idea as AEO, described in plainer language. It covers the work of getting your business named in AI-generated answers: making your website clearly state what you do and where, keeping your business listings accurate and consistent, building the third-party mentions and reviews that AI systems read as evidence you're real and reputable, and publishing content that directly answers the questions your customers ask.
Why is my business not appearing in ChatGPT?
Usually one of four reasons. Your website doesn't clearly say what you do and which towns you serve, so the model has nothing specific to match a question against. Your listings disagree with each other — a different address or phone number across Google, Yelp and Facebook makes you look unreliable. You have thin third-party presence, so there are no independent sources confirming you exist. Or a competitor has simply published better, clearer, more-cited information than you have.
It's rarely one dramatic problem. It's normally several small credibility gaps adding up.
How does ChatGPT choose which businesses to recommend?
Not the way Google ranks pages. There's no public ranking algorithm and no way to buy placement. In broad terms, answers are shaped by what the model absorbed in training, what it retrieves from the live web when it searches, and how clearly and consistently a business is described across the sources it can see. Businesses that are described the same way in many independent places are easier to name confidently than businesses that appear once, vaguely, on their own website.
Anyone who tells you they know the exact formula is guessing. What's reliably true is that clarity, consistency and independent corroboration help.
How do I get my business recommended by AI?
Make it obvious what you do, who you serve and where you operate — in your website text, not just your design. Get your name, address and phone identical everywhere they appear. Earn genuine reviews and mentions on sites other than your own. Publish plain answers to the questions customers actually ask. Add structured data so machines can read your business details without guessing. Then re-test the prompts your customers would use, and keep going.
What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
SEO competes for a position in a list of links. AEO competes to be the business named inside a single generated answer. SEO success is measured in rankings, clicks and traffic. AEO success is measured in whether you get mentioned at all, and how you're described when you are.
They overlap heavily — most good SEO work helps AEO — but the stakes differ. Ranking fourth on Google still gets clicks. Being the fourth-best match for an AI answer usually gets you nothing, because the answer names one or two businesses and stops.
What does an AI visibility audit include?
We run the buying-intent questions your customers would actually ask — "best [your service] in [your town]" and its variations — across the major AI assistants. We record whether you're named, who gets named instead, and how each business is described. Then we check the things that plausibly explain the gap: your website's clarity, your listings' consistency, your review presence, your structured data and your third-party mentions.
You get a short written snapshot: your visibility score, the exact prompts where a competitor beats you, the specific reasons we think that's happening, and the fixes in priority order. Plain English, no dashboard.
How long does AEO take?
Technical fixes — website clarity, structured data, listing corrections — can be done in days, and AI systems can pick them up within weeks. The slower half is authority: reviews, mentions and citations on other people's websites accumulate over months, and that's usually what actually decides whether you get named.
A realistic expectation is early movement in one to three months and meaningful change in three to six. Anyone promising faster is selling you something.
Can AI recommendations or rankings be guaranteed?
No. Not by us, not by anyone. AI assistants don't publish their ranking rules, they change constantly, they give different answers to the same question on different days, and no one can buy a placement in them. Any agency guaranteeing you a spot in ChatGPT is either misunderstanding how these systems work or hoping you do.
What can be committed to is the work: making your business the clearest, most consistent, best-corroborated option in your category and area, and measuring what changes. That improves your odds. It doesn't buy certainty.
Still deciding? The snapshot is free and there's no obligation — you'll see exactly where you stand before you spend anything.
