How to Improve AEO: Getting Your Business Recommended by AI

Ask ChatGPT who the best plumber, physio or accountant in your town is, and you will get a confident answer with real business names in it. Whether yours is one of them is what answer engine optimisation, or AEO, decides. Improving it comes down to a single sentence: make your business easy for AI to find, easy to understand, and easy to trust. This article turns that sentence into a practical checklist, written for business owners rather than marketers, and honest about what nobody can promise you.

One thing to know about the advice already out there: most of it is either written by software companies selling AI visibility dashboards, or recycled from the featured-snippet era. What follows is the 2026 version, and none of it needs a subscription.

What AEO Actually Is

AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It is the work of showing up in AI-generated answers: Google's AI Overviews at the top of the results page, and assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity that people now ask directly. Where SEO is measured in rankings and clicks, AEO is measured in mentions, because an assistant naming your business builds trust even when nobody clicks a thing. The two share most of their foundations, and work done for one usually lifts the other. The shift is not hypothetical either: on HubSpot's January 2026 numbers, 42% of software buyers already use AI search in their evaluations. One prerequisite before any of it: your site has to be visible to Google in the first place. If it is not, start with why a website is not showing up on Google.

Before you change anything, take your baseline:

• Ask an assistant, in plain words, who you should call for your service in your town
• Ask it 2 or 3 different ways, because assistants vary their answers between conversations
• Note which businesses get named and why, and re-check the pattern monthly

That pattern is the scoreboard you are trying to change, and re-checking it is the simplest progress report in marketing. If you prefer a structured version, my free AEO checker turns all ten foundations into a score.

Make Your Business Easy to Understand

Assistants quote the clearest sentence they can find, and jargon is never it. Write your headings as the questions your clients actually ask, then answer in the first breath: the core answer in the opening sentence or two, with the detail underneath. Current guidance puts that window at roughly the first forty to sixty words of a section, which is about the length of this sentence and the one before it.

Each section of a page should also stand on its own, because answer engines lift passages rather than whole pages. If a paragraph only makes sense after reading three others, it will never be the one that gets quoted. HubSpot's 2026 guidance says the same in six words: "answer engines tend to extract individual passages". The test is simple: could you read any single section down the phone to a customer and have it make sense? That is the standard machines reward, and conveniently, humans prefer it too.

Make It Easy to Find and Read

None of the above matters if the assistant cannot read your site in the first place. That means pages that load fast on a phone, a heading structure that descends in order like a well-organised document, and your important information sitting in plain text on the page rather than trapped inside images, pop-ups or design flourishes.

Underneath the visible page sits structured data, which is less mysterious than it sounds. Think of it as a label maker for your website: small tags that tell machines this is the business name, this is a review, this is a price, this is a question and its answer. Assistants lean on those labels heavily when deciding what a page contains and whether to cite it.

Make It Easy to Trust

Google's own guidance keeps tightening around demonstrated experience and trust, and the assistants follow the same scent. Put a named human on your pages, with a face and a role, rather than an anonymous business voice. Show when content was last updated. Gather reviews that carry detail, because a review describing a real job in a real suburb is evidence no competitor can copy. And write with the local specifics only a real business would know: the suburbs you serve, the problems this coastline gives its buildings, the questions your actual clients asked this month.

Then check your details. Your name, address, phone number and services should read identically across your site, your Google profile, your socials and every directory that lists you. Each place you appear is a source the assistant checks your story against, and disagreement between sources reads as unreliability.

Look Beyond Your Own Website

Here is what the snippet-era guides miss: assistants read far more than your website. They weigh your Google profile, your review platforms, your social pages, local directories, and conversations in forums where your trade gets discussed. For a local trade or service business, your Google profile and reviews punch hardest, which is convenient, because both are free and fully in your control; seven checks you can run yourself tell you where yours stands. If yours is half filled in, my free Google Business Profile Afternoon Kit walks you through completing it, station by station, in a single afternoon. And the wider reading keeps widening: since July 2026, Google shows businesses how their Instagram and YouTube posts perform inside Search itself.

This wider reading is also why AEO belongs inside a broader search strategy rather than beside it. If you are weighing what that investment looks like, I have written frankly about whether SEO services are worth it, and about how the whole search results page is won, because the answers to all three questions draw on the same work.

What to Expect, Honestly

Nobody can guarantee your business a place in an AI's answer, and anyone who promises one is selling you a weather forecast. What the current evidence supports is more modest and more useful: when the foundations are in place, early signals often show up within two to six weeks, usually as a mention for a niche or local question. From there it compounds with steady work, the same way ordinary search visibility does. Refresh your key pages a few times a year, keep the reviews coming, re-run your baseline question monthly, and treat every mention as the new enquiry channel it is.

And if you would rather know exactly where you stand before you start, an AI visibility audit answers that in one pass: my Found Report runs the live tests, asking ChatGPT and Gemini who they recommend for your service in your area, and records whether you are named, alongside every foundation on this page. And when you want the deep version for your website specifically, The Full Picture reads every page you have, one by one, against the same AI search shift, and hands you the verdict and the plan.

What the honest timeline looks like:

Stage	Typical timing	What you might notice
Foundations laid	Weeks 0 to 2	Nothing visible yet. This is groundwork
Early signals	Weeks 2 to 6	Named for a niche or local question
Compounding	Months 3 to 6	Mentions widen as steady work stacks up
Maintenance	Quarterly	Refreshed pages keep the answers current

And if you want this article turned into checkboxes: the free AI Visibility Kit covers all of it, the live AI test included, step by step with no email wall.

If you would rather have this whole checklist handled for you, answer engine optimisation is built into my Organic Website Growth & Search Positioning service, with every inclusion and the price published on the page.

Frequently Asked Questions