A growing number of people no longer start with a Google search box. They ask an AI assistant: "who's a good plumber in Brighton?", "what's the best CRM for a small wholesaler?", "recommend a web agency near me." The assistant doesn't show ten blue links. It names a few options and moves on. If your business isn't one of them, you're invisible in a way that's even more final than page two of Google.
The reassuring part is that getting recommended by AI isn't mysterious, and it isn't a trick. AI assistants are trying to give a good, trustworthy answer, so they favour businesses whose information is clear, specific, consistent and backed up by other sources. Make yourself easy to understand and easy to trust, and you make yourself easy to recommend. Here's how.
A quick word on the jargon: AEO, GEO and AI SEO
You will see this work labelled several ways, and the names are not settled. AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) usually means optimising to be the direct answer: in featured snippets, voice results and AI answer boxes. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) usually means being cited as a source inside generative answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews and similar. You will also see LLMO, GSO, AIO or simply AI search optimisation, all describing much the same thing. Worth knowing: Google's own position is that optimising for its AI features is still just good SEO, built on the same systems as normal search, so there is no magic separate trick. The practical steps below serve all of these names at once.
How AI search decides who to mention
Before the steps, it helps to understand what these tools are actually doing. When an assistant recommends a business, it's drawing on what it has read across the web and, increasingly, what it can look up live. It leans towards sources that are:
- Clear: the answer to the question is stated plainly, not buried.
- Specific: concrete details, names, places and numbers, rather than vague marketing.
- Structured: organised in a way that's easy to read and extract.
- Corroborated: the same facts about you appear consistently across several trusted places, not just your own site.
- Current: recently updated information beats something last touched in 2019.
Almost everything below is just a practical way of hitting those five marks.
1. Answer real questions directly on your site
AI tools love a clear, self-contained answer they can lift and attribute. If someone might ask "how much does a website cost?" or "do you cover my area?", answer it plainly on your site, ideally near the top of the relevant page, in a sentence or two before you elaborate.
Bury the answer in paragraph nine and the assistant may never extract it. State it clearly up front and you become the easy source to quote.
2. Be specific and declarative
Vague copy is invisible to AI. "We offer competitive turnaround times" gives an assistant nothing to repeat. "Most small business websites we build go live in three to four weeks" is a specific, quotable fact. Replace soft marketing language with concrete claims: real numbers, real places, real specifics. Specificity is what gets you named.
3. Add FAQ sections and structured data
A short FAQ section answering the genuine questions customers ask, marked up with FAQ structured data (schema), is strong practice: it makes you eligible for rich results in Google and hands any machine clean, clearly-labelled questions and answers to read, in exactly the format they want.
4. Get mentioned on sites the AI already trusts
This is the big one, and the one most businesses neglect. An assistant trusts a fact more when it appears in several independent, reputable places, not only on your own website. Mentions in local press, respected directories, industry publications and genuine customer reviews all corroborate that you exist, do what you say, and are worth recommending.
Your own site says you're good. The wider web saying so is what tips an AI towards naming you.
5. Keep your details identical everywhere
If your business name, address, phone number and description differ slightly across your website, Google Business Profile, social accounts and directory listings, you create doubt. Consistency builds confidence: the same details, written the same way, in every place you appear. Tidy up the mismatches and pick one version of everything.
6. Keep your Google Business Profile complete and current
For anything local, your Google Business Profile is a major source AI tools draw on. A complete profile with the right category, accurate hours, photos and a steady flow of reviews is often the difference between being recommended for a "near me" question and being skipped. Treat it as a live asset, not a one-off setup.
7. Publish original, useful information
Assistants favour sources that add something, not pages that echo what's already everywhere. A genuinely useful guide, your own data, or a clear explanation of something in your field gives AI a reason to read you, trust you and cite you. This is also why original research and honest how-to content are worth the effort: they earn both links and AI mentions.
8. Don't hide your content where machines can't read it
If your key information lives only inside images, videos or scripts that are hard to parse, AI tools may simply miss it. Make sure the important facts about your business exist as plain, readable text on the page. If a person needs it to make a decision, a machine needs to be able to read it.
The honest summary
There's a lot of noise about "AI SEO" being a brand new discipline you need to pay an expert for. Most of it isn't. The businesses AI recommends are, overwhelmingly, the ones that are clear about what they do, specific in how they say it, consistent everywhere they appear, and well regarded by other sources. That's good marketing groundwork, pointed deliberately at how these tools read the web.
Do the foundations properly and you don't have to choose between ranking on Google and being recommended by AI. The same clarity wins both.
