Be the answer when AI does the searching

Call it AEO (answer engine optimisation), GEO (generative engine optimisation) or AI SEO; it is one job. Google's own guidance is that there is no separate trick for AI Overviews and AI Mode: they draw on the same index and reward the same things as ordinary search, only more so. The pages that get quoted are the ones that state a fact plainly near the top, name who is speaking and where they are, and can be fetched by the crawler in the first place. Most small business sites fail all three, not because the work is hard but because nobody has checked.

The first thing we do is measure. We keep a fixed list of the questions your customers ask an assistant ("how much does a remap cost in Chester", "who does bilingual websites in North Wales") and run them monthly through Google AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity, logging whether you are named and which page is cited. That reference rate is the number this work moves, and you see it every month next to the Search Console figures, so nobody has to take our word for it.

Then the pages. Every service and location page gets an opening that answers the question on its own when lifted out: the service, the place, the price or the timescale, in the first two sentences. Where a page carries real questions, they are marked up as questions. The organisation is described once, consistently, with the same name, address, phone and identity across every page and profile, so a model that has read three sources about you can tell they are the same business. We do not add fake reviews, invented statistics or pages for every town in the county; assistants are trained to distrust exactly that, and so is Google.

Access is the part everyone forgets. Cloudflare's managed robots file and several security products block GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot by default, which makes the rest pointless. We decide with you which assistants may read the site, open the door to those, and verify it from outside. We also publish an llms.txt file because it costs nothing and some assistants read it, while being honest that Google ignores it.

What this is not: a guarantee of being quoted, a replacement for SEO, or a way to rank a thin site. AI Overviews cut clicks on informational searches, so the strategy is to be the business named for the commercial ones, in your area, where a click still turns into a phone call.