How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT

A growing slice of your customers never scroll through search results anymore. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google's AI Overviews a question like "who's a good dentist near Mission Viejo?" and take whatever answer comes back. The businesses in that answer win. Everyone else doesn't exist.

Marc Vaccaro
May 12 · 7 min read

Getting into those answers has a name: answer engine optimization, or AEO. It overlaps with classic SEO, but it's not the same job, and right now it has one enormous advantage. Almost nobody local is doing it. The businesses that structure their sites for AI answers early are competing against a nearly empty field, which is a sentence that has not been true about Google rankings in fifteen years.

How an AI Assistant Decides Who to Recommend

When someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, the model isn't running your ads or checking your ranking. It's drawing on what it can read and verify about you: your website's content, structured data that spells out what you do and where, reviews, and how consistently your basic facts appear across the web.

That last part trips up more businesses than you'd expect. If your website says one service area, your Google Business Profile says another, and your hours are different on Yelp, a human might shrug it off. A language model treats inconsistency as uncertainty, and uncertain businesses don't get cited.

What AEO Work Actually Looks Like

There's no secret handshake, just a set of habits that make your business easy for machines to read and safe to recommend:

  • Structured data. Schema.org markup (LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ, breadcrumbs) turns your pages from prose a model has to interpret into facts it can simply use: what you do, where you are, what you charge, when you're open.
  • Question-and-answer content. AI answers are built from questions. Pages that plainly ask and answer the questions your customers actually have are the easiest raw material to cite.
  • An llms.txt file. A plain-text summary of your business written for language models, sitting at your domain root. It's a small thing, but it puts your preferred facts in one crawlable place.
  • Consistent facts everywhere. Same name, same phone number, same service area, on your site and every profile that mentions you.
  • A site that's technically clean. Fast, crawlable, mobile-friendly. The boring fundamentals still gate everything else.

Does It Replace SEO or Ads? No, and That's the Point

AEO doesn't replace anything. It's a third channel that shares a foundation with the other two. The structured data that helps ChatGPT cite you also earns rich results on Google. The question-and-answer pages that feed AI Overviews also rank for long-tail searches. And while SEO and AEO build durable visibility over months, paid ads deliver leads this week. The businesses doing best right now run all three off one website that's built to support them.

One practical note: because we build the websites we optimize, adding schema, restructuring content, and publishing machine-readable files is routine work for us rather than a change request to someone else's developer. That's true of any shop that owns both sides, and it's worth asking about before you hire anyone for AEO.

A Simple Test You Can Run Today

Open ChatGPT and ask it the question your customers would ask, something like "who should I call for [what you do] in [your city]?" If you're in the answer, congratulations, and check that the details are right. If you're not, that's not a verdict, it's a to-do list. The field is still early enough that a few months of deliberate work can put you in answers your competitors don't know exist yet.

Back to Blog Overview