Will AI recommend your business? AEO, explained in plain English

More people now ask an AI who to hire instead of searching.

Instead of typing "accountant Toronto" and scrolling through a page of results, your next customer types "who's a good accountant in Toronto?" into ChatGPT, or just reads the AI answer Google now puts above everything else. One answer. A couple of names. No page two.

If your business isn't in that answer, the customer never hears of you.

What AEO actually is

You already know SEO: making your site easy for Google to rank. AEO, answer engine optimization, is making your business easy for an AI to recommend.

That's the whole idea. No mystique. AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity build their answers from what they can read and verify about you. When they can't read you clearly, they recommend someone they can.

How to get recommended by ChatGPT: five steps

AI systems reward clarity. In practice that means the same things a careful human buyer wants to know.

1. Check what AI says about you today. Ask ChatGPT, Google's AI, and Perplexity the questions your buyers ask. Write down who gets named. That's your starting line.
2. State what you do, who you serve, and where, on every page. Say it plainly, in the words a buyer would use. If a human has to dig for it, an AI won't bother.
3. Structure your pages so machines can read them. Use real headings, keep one clear topic per page, and add structured data that labels your business, services, and location. It's plumbing your visitors never see.
4. Answer the questions buyers actually ask. "How much does it cost?" "How long does it take?" "Do you work with businesses like mine?" AI assistants quote FAQ answers directly.
5. Make sure the rest of the web agrees with you. More on this below, because it's the step most sites skip.

Notice what's not on that list: keyword stuffing, hacks, or paying anyone a monthly retainer to "do AEO" forever. Most of it is built once, correctly, at the level of your website's structure.

Off-site signals: proof you're real

An AI assistant doesn't take your website's word for it. It looks for other sources that say the same thing about you. When those sources agree, you look real. When they contradict each other, you look risky, and it names someone else.

• Google Business Profile: claim it, pick the right categories, and fill it in completely. It feeds Google's own AI answers directly.
• Directories that matter in your field: a few relevant, well-kept listings beat dozens of forgotten ones.
• One name and one description everywhere: your business name, address, website, and a one-line description should match on your site, your profile, LinkedIn, and every listing. Small differences make you look like two different businesses.
• Reviews: real ones, from real customers, on the profiles people check.

The test you can run right now

Open ChatGPT (or Claude, or Perplexity) and ask it what you'd want a customer to ask. "Best [what you do] in [where you are]" is a fine start. You'll see one of three outcomes:

1. You're in the answer. Great. You're ahead of most of your competitors.
2. Competitors are in the answer and you're not. That's fixable, and worth fixing before the habit sets in.
3. The AI hedges and names nobody local. That's an open lane. The clearest, best-described business in your category has the best shot at becoming the default answer.

Why we build it into the site

Most "AEO services" being sold right now are SEO retainers with a new label. But the substance (machine-readable structure, clear positioning, real answers on real pages) lives in how your website is built. Bolting it on afterwards costs more and works worse.

That's why we bake it in from the first commit: every site we ship is structured to be read by people, ranked by Google, and quoted by AI.

If you ran the test above and didn't like the answer, we can help. We're based in Toronto, and the work applies to the site you already have or a new one. Here's how we approach AI search optimization in Toronto, and what you keep when we're done.