Guide · AI search (AEO): How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews
What actually makes AI assistants and Google AI Overviews recommend a local business: Google Business Profile, reviews, consistent listings, answer-first content. What is proven, what is hype.
The short answer
AI assistants recommend businesses they can find in several places that agree with each other: a complete Google Business Profile, recent genuine reviews, a fast website with clear answers, consistent name, address and phone details across directories, and mentions on third-party sites that people trust. There is no trick. The work is being easy to verify, and then being worth recommending.
What is reasonably well supported
Reported research on local AI recommendations is mostly from industry vendors, so treat exact percentages as directional. SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index reported that AI assistants recommend far fewer locations than Google's local 3-pack does, with ChatGPT at about 1.2%, Perplexity about 7.4% and Gemini about 11%, against 35.9% for the 3-pack. Selection is narrow, which is why being consistently verifiable matters.
- A complete, active Google Business Profile. Gemini and AI Overviews draw on Google's own local data.
- Genuine reviews with detail, collected steadily rather than in bursts.
- The same name, address, phone and website everywhere: the site, the profile and directories.
- A fast, server-rendered website with answers near the top of the page, because AI systems read the page text.
- Third-party mentions on sites people trust, including directories and relevant local lists.
- Being indexed by both Google and Bing. ChatGPT and Copilot lean on web search, so check Bing Webmaster Tools as well as Search Console.
What is hype
Be sceptical of anyone selling these as the answer.
- llms.txt. Studies of AI crawler traffic found it is rarely requested and shows no measurable effect on citations. It is cheap to add, so we ship one, but it is a hedge, not a strategy.
- Hidden text, fake reviews, link schemes or thin pages for every suburb. These risk a Google penalty and an ACCC problem, and they do not get you recommended.
- Guarantees that any assistant will name you. Answers vary between runs, so nobody can promise placement.
What we do for clients
For a local service business we set up and complete the Google Business Profile, clean up the listings so the details match, build a fast site with a clear page for each service you actually offer, write answer-first FAQ content from the questions customers really ask, set up Bing and Google indexing, and help you collect honest reviews. Then we test the prompts your customers use in each assistant, and record what comes back so you can see what changed.
FAQ
Quick answers.
Make your business easy to verify and worth recommending: a complete Google Business Profile, recent genuine reviews, a fast website with clear answers, consistent details on directories, and indexing in both Google and Bing. No one can guarantee a placement, because answers change between runs.
AEO (answer-engine optimisation), also called GEO, is making your business easy for AI assistants and AI search to find, trust and name in answers. It builds on normal SEO and local SEO rather than replacing them.
Current evidence says it does not move citations in a measurable way, and AI crawlers rarely request it. It is harmless to publish, but spend your effort on your Google Business Profile, reviews and website content first.
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