Your customers have changed how they search. Instead of scrolling through ten blue links on Google, more and more people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude a direct question: "What's a good plumber near me?" or "Which accountant handles freelancers in Austin?" If the AI doesn't know your business exists, you don't get recommended. This is the new frontier of online visibility, and it's why AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), sometimes called GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), now matters as much as classic SEO.

The good news: getting found by AI assistants isn't a dark art. It comes down to making your information clear, structured and machine-readable. Here's how to do it.

Why getting cited by AI is different from ranking on Google

Traditional SEO is about ranking a page so a human clicks it. AI search is about giving the assistant facts it can confidently quote. When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation, the model isn't showing a list, it's synthesizing an answer and naming a few businesses. To be one of those names, your site has to make three things obvious and unambiguous: who you are, what you do, and how to reach or book you.

AI models and the AI agents built on top of them (the tools that browse, compare and even book on a user's behalf) reward clarity. Vague marketing copy, prices hidden behind a "contact us" form, and services buried in a slideshow all work against you. Plain, factual, well-labeled content wins.

1. Add Schema.org structured data

Schema.org markup is a standardized vocabulary that tells machines exactly what your content means. A human sees "Open 9-5"; a search engine sees a labeled openingHours field it can trust. This structured data is one of the strongest signals you can send.

For a small business, focus on the schema types that answer real questions:

  • LocalBusiness or Organization: name, address, phone, hours, area served.
  • Service or Product: what you offer, ideally with prices.
  • FAQPage: your common questions and answers in a format AI can lift directly.
  • Review or AggregateRating: social proof the model can cite.

2. Write FAQs the way people actually ask

AI assistants are built to answer questions, so a strong FAQ section is gold. The trick is to phrase questions in natural, conversational language, the same way a customer would type them into ChatGPT: "Do you offer same-day appointments?", "How much does a basic service cost?", "Do you work with small businesses?"

Give each question a direct, complete answer in the first sentence. Don't bury the response in three paragraphs of preamble, models prefer the answer up front, and so do your customers. A good FAQ also catches the long-tail, specific queries that competitors ignore.

3. Make services, prices and contact details crystal clear

This is the step most businesses skip, and it's the easiest win. AI assistants can only recommend what they can read. Put the essentials in plain text on your site:

  • Services: list them explicitly, each with a one-line description.
  • Prices: even a "starting from" figure or a range beats silence. Agents that compare options need numbers.
  • Contact and location: phone, email, address and service area, as text, not trapped inside an image.
  • Booking: a clear link to book, call or request a quote.

If a detail only exists inside a PDF, a graphic or a JavaScript widget that doesn't render cleanly, assume the AI can't see it.

4. Publish an llms.txt file and an /ai-agents page

Just as robots.txt guides search crawlers, llms.txt is an emerging standard that hands AI models a clean, curated summary of your site, the key pages, your offering and the facts you most want quoted. It removes the guesswork.

Going a step further, a dedicated /ai-agents page acts as a front door specifically for AI assistants and autonomous agents. It lays out your business in a structured, predictable way: services, pricing, availability, contact and booking endpoints. Think of it as a fact sheet written for machines, the format AI tools are increasingly trained to look for.

Putting it all together

None of these steps require rewriting your website. They're about exposing the facts you already have in a format AI can read and trust: Schema.org markup, natural-language FAQs, transparent services and prices, an llms.txt file and an agent-friendly page. Do them, and you stop being invisible the moment a potential customer asks an assistant for a recommendation.

Not sure how AI-ready your site is today? Run a free scan of your website to get your AgentReady Score and a checklist of what to fix, then explore our plans to generate your llms.txt, structured data, FAQs and /ai-agents page automatically. Get found, get understood, get recommended.