Something real is happening in how people find local businesses. A homeowner asks ChatGPT “my AC is short cycling, do I need a new unit or a repair,” or gets an AI Overview at the top of their Google results, and an answer comes back naming a handful of businesses. If yours is one of them, that’s a warm lead you paid nothing for. If it never is, you’re invisible in a channel that’s growing every month.
Naturally, an industry has sprung up to sell you the fix. It goes by many names: AEO, GEO, LLM optimization. It comes with new file formats, new markup schemes, new monthly retainers, and a strong implication that everything you knew about SEO is obsolete.
Most of it is snake oil. And I don’t have to speculate, because Google published an AI features guide for site owners that names several of these tactics and says, flatly, that they don’t help.
The one idea that makes this simple
AI search and regular search aren’t separate games. Google is explicit that its AI features run on the same core ranking systems as normal search, and the other assistants read the same pages everyone else does. There is no secret second internet where the AI answers come from. Content that ranks well and reads clearly for humans is exactly the content AI systems cite.
The hacks to keep your wallet away from
If a proposal headlines any of these, slide it back across the table:
- Special AI files and markup. Google says these don’t help its AI features. Assistants read your normal pages.
- “Chunking” your content into fragments for AI. Modern systems handle full pages fine; shredding a coherent service page mostly makes it worse for the humans reading it.
- A separate AI-tuned copy of your content. Paying to write everything twice so one version can be ignored.
- A page for every question phrasing. Google calls this scaled content abuse. It’s spam-policy territory, so the expensive “strategy” can actively hurt you.
- Buying brand mentions around the web. Rhymes with the link-buying schemes that have gotten sites penalized for two decades.
The tell, in every case: the tactic exists only to impress a machine. Nothing that ignores the human reader ends up mattering.
What actually gets you cited
Four things carry most of the weight, and they’re the same work that earns rankings and customers.
- Answer real questions, plainly. “We deliver end-to-end comfort solutions” gives an AI nothing to quote. “A ductless mini-split install typically takes one to two days” is the kind of specific sentence that shows up in answers with your name on it. Collect the fifteen questions customers actually ask you on the phone and answer each one on your site, direct answer first.
- Show who you are, and prove it. An About page with actual humans and credentials, real project photos instead of stock, verifiable reviews, license numbers where they belong. When an assistant picks three businesses to name, verifiable and real beats vague and polished.
- Keep the basics boringly correct. Fast, works on phones, one clear page per service, consistent name-address-phone, a maintained Google Business Profile. Schema markup belongs here too, with honest expectations: it keeps your facts unambiguous, it is not a magic ticket into AI answers.
- Publish steadily, from what you know. One genuinely useful answer a month from your actual work beats thirty pages of generated filler, and the filler carries spam-policy risk on top of being useless.
The quiet advantage
Here’s the encouraging part. AI search rewards what a good small business already has: specific knowledge, real experience, a track record, a human story. It’s the thin, mass-produced content that gets filtered out, and a lot of your bigger competitors are sitting on exactly that.
The businesses that win this channel won’t be the ones that bought the most AEO. They’ll be the ones whose websites plainly say who they are, prove it, and answer the questions customers are already asking.
That’s work I do, content, SEO, and the site itself, for businesses that would rather run their business than become publishers. If you’d rather have it handled, put me to work.