Getting found by AI: what AEO means for a local business.

A growing share of your prospects will never see a results page. They will ask an assistant and act on the answer.

Someone needs a service. Instead of searching and scanning ten links, they ask an AI assistant and get one recommendation, or three. They call one. That is the entire journey, and your website was never involved.

Answer Engine Optimization is the unlovely name for making sure you are in that answer.

How assistants decide what to say

They assemble answers from what they can read and verify: your website's actual content, your business profile, directory listings, reviews, and coverage elsewhere. They favor information that is consistent across sources, because agreement looks like truth.

This has an uncomfortable implication. If your hours differ between your site and your profile, if your address is stale on three directories, if your services are described in marketing language nowhere else corroborates — an assistant has no reason to trust any of it, so it recommends someone clearer.

What actually helps

• Answer real questions in plain language. Assistants extract answers, not slogans. A page that plainly says what you do, where, for whom, and what it costs is machine-readable in a way that "elevating experiences since 2004" is not.
• Structured data. Schema markup tells a machine what your page means rather than making it guess. It is unglamorous and it works.
• Consistency everywhere. Same name, address, phone, hours, services — across every property. This is the single highest-leverage AEO task and it is free.
• Reviews with substance. Assistants read them. Specific reviews mentioning specific services help more than a wall of five-star silence.
• Let the crawlers in. Check that your robots file does not block the AI crawlers. Many sites block them by accident and wonder why they never appear.
• A plain-text summary of your business. An llms.txt file at your root gives assistants a clean, structured account of who you are instead of forcing them to parse your homepage.

What does not help

Keyword stuffing, AI-generated filler, and thin pages built for volume. Those were mediocre tactics for search and they are worthless for assistants, which are looking for verifiable specifics, not word count.

The honest state of it

This field is young and the rules are moving. Anyone selling you guaranteed AI rankings is inventing a product. What is durable is the boring foundation: be accurate, be consistent, be specific, be readable. That has been good advice for twenty years. It just got a new acronym.