How AI decides which business to recommend.
Someone asks an assistant for a furnace repair in their city. One name comes back. That answer is not a search result — it is assembled from facts already written down about you, or missing.
Five things decide the answer.
01 — 05 / what decides itYour Google profile
The largest single source. Categories, services, areas, hours, photos. Thin or wrong here and nothing downstream rescues it.
The code Google reads
Structured data: the machine-readable version of who you are, what you sell and where you work. Most sites carry none at all.
A page for each service and area
A page that answers the question beats a homepage that mentions it. One for each job you do, one for each place you go.
The same facts everywhere
Name, phone and address identical across every directory. Disagreements do not just split the signal — they make you unreliable.
Reviews, and your replies
Recent, specific, answered. A reply is the only part of a review you control, and it gets read along with the review.
All five are inputs, not tricks. They are also, almost exactly, the monthly work in the system — which is why this is not a separate product with its own price.
A person reads your page. A model reads this.
the difference{
"@type": "HVACBusiness",
"name": "Northgate Heating",
"areaServed": ["Edmonton", "St. Albert", "Sherwood Park"],
"makesOffer": ["Furnace repair",
"Furnace replacement",
"No-heat emergency call"],
"openingHours": "Mo-Su 00:00-24:00",
"sameAs": ["google.com/maps/place/…",
"yelp.ca/biz/…",
"homestars.com/…"]
}
Nothing here is written for a reader.
It is the same business, stated so a machine cannot misread it. Where the page
says “available around the clock”, this says
Mo-Su 00:00-24:00. Where the page says “Edmonton and
area”, this names the areas.
Which is why “we have a website” is not an answer.
A site can look finished and state none of this. With nothing structured to read, an assistant falls back on whoever did write it down.
You can check this yourself.
thirty secondsOpen any assistant and ask it the question your customer would ask — the trade, the city, the urgency. Who should I call for a furnace that quit in Edmonton tonight?
Whatever name comes back, it came back because of the five things above. That is the entire mechanism, and it is the one part of this you do not have to take on trust.
Nobody can report your ChatGPT ranking.
what we will not claimThere is no ranking report for an AI answer. It changes by phrasing, by account and by day, and nobody — us included — can sample it at a scale that would make a monthly number mean anything. If someone sells you AI citation tracking, ask what the denominator is.
What we track instead, because it is real
- Keyword position
- Position 1–100 for each phrase, per location, and every check kept — so movement is a diff between two real readings, not a number somebody overwrote.
- Listing status
- Every directory as one row: listed, claimed, submitted, inconsistent or missing — and whether the name, address and phone actually agree.
- The month’s work
- Each item logged with the date and the page or listing it touched. Content, technical, profile, listings, links, reporting.
Those are the inputs to the answer, and we can show you every one of them moving. We cannot show you the answer itself — and we would rather say so here than invent a chart.
This is not a separate product.
where this sitsVisibility is half of the system; the other half answers what it brings in. One price, no contract, website included. There is no AEO package to buy.
Two that go deeper.
read nextHow to show up when someone asks ChatGPT
There is no submission form, and what is being sold to you instead mostly does not work. What actually moves it.
AEO vs SEO: what actually changes
Less than the name suggests. Four things genuinely differ; the one that matters — what moves it — does not.
Questions.
faqWhat is answer engine optimization?
Getting named when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation instead of typing into a search box. The work is mostly the same work that makes you findable on Google — a correct profile, structured data, a page for each service and area, consistent listings, reviews — because that is what the assistants read.
Can you guarantee an AI assistant will recommend my business?
No, and nobody can. The answer varies by phrasing, by account and by day. What we guarantee is page one on Google in 90 days, or we work free — because that is measurable.
How is this different from SEO?
Less than the name suggests. A search result hands over ten links and lets the reader choose. An AI answer usually gives one name and no choice. That raises the stakes on being the name, but the inputs are the same inputs.
Do you track whether AI mentions my business?
We do not, and we will not pretend to. There is no reliable way to sample an AI answer at a scale that would make a monthly figure mean anything. We track keyword position by location, every directory listing and whether its details agree, and each item of work with the date it was done.
Does this cost extra?
No. Visibility work is part of the system at $1,500 a month, with the website and landing pages included and no contract.
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