When people ask AI assistants for recommendations, does my business come up?

Ask ChatGPT for a wedding photographer in your city and it will name names. Somebody gets those mentions. This pillar is about becoming that somebody before your competitors learn the acronyms.

Where AI answers come from

Assistants synthesize from what they can read and verify: your Google Business Profile, review platforms, directories, your own site’s content, and how consistently the web agrees on what your business is. Sparse, inconsistent, or claim-heavy-but-proof-light presences get skipped, because the assistant has better-documented options to recommend. How to check what AI says about you shows the exact prompts to test.

The three layers of the work

AEO, answer engine optimization, structures your content so a direct answer is extractable: question-shaped headings, the answer in the first sentence, FAQ markup. AEO explained simply covers it. GEO, generative engine optimization, is the citation layer: entity consistency, schema depth, and files like llms.txt that tell AI crawlers what your business is. GEO explained goes deeper. And underneath both sits the boring foundation: reviews, profiles, and real content, the same assets local SEO runs on.

Why this compounds

AI answers concentrate attention on fewer names than a page of ten blue links did. Being one of two mentioned businesses is worth more than ranking sixth ever was, and the sites doing this work now are the ones the models keep citing later. Where customers actually look now: AI search vs Google.

Find out what the machines say

I’ll run the real prompts your customers use, on the real assistants, and send you what comes back: whether you appear, who gets named instead, and the three moves that change it. That’s the AI Visibility Check, free, same day.