What Is AEO? How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Other AIs

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your business visible and citable when buyers ask AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot — questions like "who is the best [your category] provider in Florida?" Where SEO earns you a ranking on a results page, AEO earns you a mention inside the answer itself.

It stopped being optional: 45% of B2B buyers already use AI to make purchase decisions (Gartner), and AI-generated answers now appear in roughly 45% of Google searches.

Try this test right now

Open any AI assistant and ask it what your ideal buyer would ask before hiring you: "best [your industry] company in [your city]," "how do I choose a [your service] provider." Look at who shows up.

We ran this test on ourselves and published the result on LinkedIn: momo85 did not appear for "who does B2B revenue marketing in Florida." That was expected — and the reasons why are exactly what this article covers.

Why doesn't my business show up in AI answers?

Because AI engines recommend brands they have already seen repeated across many independent sources. Semrush analyzed nearly 4,000 brand appearances in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews and found that AI mentions the brands with consistent presence across the web — not the brands that describe themselves best. Brands are about 6.5x more likely to be cited through third-party sources than through their own websites.

Time compounds the challenge. The average #1 page on Google is 5 years old, only 13.7% of top-10 pages are less than a year old, and just 1.74% of newly published pages reach the top 10 within their first year (Ahrefs, 1.3M keywords). A young company starts from behind by definition. That is not a reason to skip AEO; it is the reason to start now.

How do I get my business mentioned by AI? (5 steps)

1. Answer real buyer questions on your own site. Every question a prospect has asked you in a sales call is an article: pricing, comparisons, "how do I choose," "what does it cost," "how long does it take." Lead each piece with a direct answer in the first paragraph.
2. Structure content so machines can extract it. Headings phrased as questions, comparison tables instead of prose, FAQ sections, named statistics with sources, a visible "last updated" date. Cited statistics alone boost AI visibility by roughly 40% (Princeton GEO study, KDD 2024).
3. Build third-party presence. Directories, industry lists, review platforms (G2, Clutch, Google Business Profile), local press, guest articles. AI does not recommend you because you say so; it recommends you because others say so.
4. Keep AI crawlers in. Check your robots.txt: if GPTBot, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot are blocked, those platforms cannot cite you at all.
5. Publish consistently and measure monthly. Re-run your test queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google every month and record who appears. Visibility in AI answers is a lagging indicator of months of consistent publishing — B2B buyers consume 3 to 7 pieces of content before ever talking to sales (Demand Gen Report), and AI engines learned from that same content.

AEO vs SEO: what's the difference?

They share a foundation — useful content, sound structure, authority. The difference is the outcome: SEO competes for a click on a results page; AEO competes for a mention inside an answer where the buyer may never click anything. Practically, AEO puts more weight on extractable answer blocks, named data sources, and presence on third-party sites, because that is what AI engines quote and trust.

FAQ

How long does it take to show up in AI answers? Plan for months, not weeks. AI engines favor brands with established, repeated presence across the web, and the underlying content itself takes time to accumulate authority (only 1.74% of new pages reach Google's top 10 in their first year — Ahrefs). Companies that publish weekly and build third-party mentions typically see first AI citations within 6 to 12 months.

Do I need to pay to appear in ChatGPT answers? No. AI assistants do not sell placement in organic answers. Visibility comes from content quality, structure, and third-party corroboration — which means small companies can win specific, well-defined questions against bigger competitors.

Is AEO worth it for a local B2B business? Especially for local: "best [service] in [city]" is exactly the kind of question buyers now ask AI, the competition for it is thinner than for national terms, and local third-party signals (Google Business Profile, local directories, chamber listings, local press) are within any SMB's reach.

momo85 is a revenue marketing agency for B2B companies in Florida. We are doing our own AEO in public — this article is part of that experiment.