AI VISIBILITY: HOW TO GET CHATGPT AND GOOGLE AI TO RECOMMEND YOUR BUSINESS

Your next customer might never see your website in a list of search results. They ask ChatGPT "who should I call for a kitchen reno in Edmonton?" or they Google it and read the AI Overview at the top — and a handful of businesses get named. Everyone else doesn't exist. This is what AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are about: making sure that when the AI answers, the answer is you.

HOW AI ASSISTANTS PICK THEIR RECOMMENDATIONS

AI assistants don't rank pages the way old search did. When someone asks for a recommendation, the model pulls from two places: what it learned in training (the general reputation of businesses and brands across the web) and what it retrieves live (search results, business listings, review platforms, your website). Then it synthesizes a confident answer naming two or three options.

That means the question isn't "how do I rank #1?" — it's "does the machine know who I am, what I do, where I do it, and why I'm trustworthy?" Every tactic below feeds one of those four signals.

STRUCTURED DATA: SPEAK MACHINE

Schema markup (JSON-LD) is a layer of code on your website that tells machines, in their own language, exactly what your business is: name, services, service area, hours, reviews, FAQs. Humans never see it. AI systems and search crawlers rely on it.

For a local business, the priorities are LocalBusiness or Organization schema, Service schema for each thing you sell, and FAQPage schema on questions your customers actually ask. When an AI retrieves your site and finds clean structured data, it doesn't have to guess what you do — and models recommend what they're certain about.

LLMS.TXT: THE NEW FRONT DOOR

llms.txt is an emerging standard — a plain-text file on your site written specifically for AI models. Think of it as a robots.txt for the AI era: a concise, structured summary of who you are, what you offer, and where to find the details, designed to be read by a language model instead of a human.

Is it guaranteed that every AI reads it? No — the standard is young. But it costs almost nothing to implement, several AI crawlers already look for it, and being early on machine-readable standards is exactly how businesses got ahead in the first SEO era. We ship one with every site we build.

REVIEWS AND CITATIONS: WHAT THE MACHINES TRUST

AI models are skeptical of what you say about yourself and credulous about what others say about you. Reviews on Google, third-party directories, local news mentions, industry listings — these are the citations that convince a model you're a safe recommendation.

• Volume and recency of Google reviews — a steady stream beats a burst from 2023.
• Consistency— your name, address, and phone number should be identical everywhere. Conflicting data makes machines hedge, and hedging machines don't name you.
• Specific review content— "great service" is weak; "rebuilt our deck in Spruce Grove in three days" teaches the model what you do and where.

WRITE CONTENT THE AI CAN QUOTE

Language models love content that answers a question directly, in the first sentence, and then supports it. Pages built like this get quoted; pages built like brochures get skipped. The formats that work:

• Question-shaped headings that match what customers actually ask.
• A direct answer in the first one or two sentences under each heading.
• FAQ sections with real questions — not marketing copy disguised as questions.
• Concrete specifics: service areas, timelines, processes. Vague content gives the model nothing to cite.

Notice that this is also just good writing for humans. AEO doesn't fight SEO — it's the same honesty, structured better.

WHY EARLY MOVERS WIN

Here's the part that should get your attention: almost no local business is doing any of this yet. In traditional SEO, you're fighting fifteen years of entrenched competitors. In AI visibility, the field is nearly empty — which means modest, consistent effort right now can make you the default answer in your category before your competitors know the game exists.

And the advantage compounds. Once a model consistently associates your name with your service and your city — through structured data, citations, and quotable content — that association keeps working as AI search grows. You're not renting attention like ads. You're becoming the answer.

WHERE TO START

Ask ChatGPT and Google who they recommend in your category and city, today. If it's not you, that's your baseline. Then: clean up your business listings, add structured data and an llms.txt to your site, build a steady review habit, and restructure your key pages to answer questions directly.

Or have us do it. This is exactly what our AI visibility service covers — and it works best on a fast, well-structured website built to convert the traffic it earns. Book a free 20-minute calland we'll show you what the AI says about your category right now.