straight answers, no jargon
What AI visibility is, how assistants choose who to recommend, and what it takes to become the answer. Written to be quoted.
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is whether AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI name your business when customers ask who to hire. When someone asks "best dentist near me", the assistant recommends two or three businesses and stops. AI visibility measures whether you are one of them.
What is AEO, or answer engine optimization?
AEO is the practice of making a business the answer AI assistants give, rather than one result among many. It covers structured data, question-shaped content, crawler access, business profile completeness, and consistent identity across the web: the signals answer engines weigh when they pick a shortlist.
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO earns a ranking on a results page the customer still has to read. AEO earns the recommendation itself. An AI answer names very few businesses, so the outcome is closer to winner-take-most: position eleven in Google still gets some clicks, but a business the assistant does not name gets nothing. The disciplines overlap, and good AEO builds on good SEO fundamentals.
What are GEO, AIO, and LLMO?
They are near-synonyms for the same discipline. GEO is generative engine optimization, AIO is AI optimization, and LLMO is large language model optimization. All describe optimizing a business to be named and cited by AI systems. AEO, answer engine optimization, is the most common term for local and service businesses.
How do AI assistants decide which businesses to recommend?
Assistants with live web search read structured data on business websites, business profiles, reviews on the platforms they cite, and mentions across the web, then synthesize a shortlist. They do not judge how a site looks. A business with clean machine-readable signals routinely beats a prettier competitor whose site AI cannot parse.
How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?
Make your site machine-readable with schema markup, answer real customer questions in quotable text, keep your Google Business Profile complete and consistent with your site, hold reviews on platforms assistants cite, and allow AI crawlers in robots.txt. Then measure: run the same customer questions against the live assistants and see whether you appear. That measurement is exactly what our free AEO check does.
Does schema markup affect AI answers?
Yes. Structured data in JSON-LD is the format assistants and their search layers parse to understand who a business is, where it is, and what it does. It is not a magic ranking switch, but missing or broken markup makes a business illegible to the systems assembling the answer, and illegible businesses do not get recommended.
What does the free AEO check measure?
Eighteen real customer questions, asked live on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, with over 120 answers captured verbatim. It scores visibility in those answers, site readability from a deterministic audit, accuracy on direct questions about your business, and your entity footprint. Every number links to captured evidence, and a person reviews the report before it publishes.
How much does a website with AI visibility cost?
Our builds are fixed price: Foundation at $3,500, Growth at $7,500, and Authority at $15,000. If your current site is worth keeping, the AEO retrofit is $1,995 and makes it readable to AI in five business days. Monitoring, with monthly re-runs and competitor tracking, starts at $149 per month.
How long does it take to become AI visible?
Site-side signals are fixable in days: schema, crawler access, citable content ship with the build or retrofit. Assistants then have to re-encounter you, which takes weeks, not hours, and varies by surface. That is why we re-run your check at launch and at 90 days and show the before and after in the same evidence format, instead of promising a date.
See where you stand before you decide anything.