There are ways to improve your business’s visibility in AI, but there is no silver bullet. For decades, we have been preaching good hygiene in SEO. For AEO/AI visibility, the same basic principles apply.
Here are some things to avoid—and to do—to improve your chances of AI success.
1) Don’t Chase the Shiny Objects in the LLM Press
We see this across clients: the mad rush to implement whatever was in the last article they read. The fact is, no one thing will get you to the top. From encouraging deep dives into Reddit threads to posting FAQs everywhere, you can go down a long road to nowhere following any number of sure-fire methods. That’s not to say they have no merit, but no single tactic is going to get it done, and focusing on one thing only certainly won’t.
2) Recognize How Your Prospective Customers Will Look for Your Products or Services
LLMs are highly contextual in how they make recommendations. In highly involved, technical, or complicated categories, you’re likely to get a lot more deep-thought content derived from the LLMs’ training and supplemented by discovery (web searches). For transactional products or services (particularly local services), discovery will be the primary driver of the AI answer. Guide your effort accordingly.
3) Ask Multiple LLMs Probing Questions About Why They Provide the Answers They Provide and How They Derived the Information
This is an interesting and frustrating exercise, but it is important for prioritizing your activities. The key to a successful exchange is to challenge the AI’s responses, go deeper, and probe for detail. The LLMs are very good at making stuff up, obfuscating, and being evasive. But with enough time and effort, you’ll gain a better understanding of how the AIs are making their recommendations.
4) Recognize That All the AIs Are Different
Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, and others are LLMs, and on the surface, may appear to give very similar answers to a question. But they are all different—from the focus of their training process to the sources of their training data to the way they gather information during discovery. If you go through #3, you’ll get an idea of those differences and how you can adjust your efforts.
What Are the Practical Steps to Gaining AI Visibility?
To gain AI visibility, there are multiple areas you can address. But keep in mind that context matters a lot. I’ll get more into this with some of the ideas below. Just know that a given step may not apply to your vertical. I’m going to focus on local businesses.
Website Content as a Differentiator
I mentioned before that context matters a lot. The AIs are looking for reasons to recommend one business above another. There are a few broad areas in which they do this:
- Proximity. The first thing the LLMs look for is proximity. If you have an address in the town the person is searching, you’re likely to be on the list of potential recommendations. Then the LLMs expand outward for service areas.
- How tightly do your offerings match the person’s request? Context matters. If your competitor lists the specific service being requested, but you just generally say “we fix cars” or “HVAC service,” the competitor will get priority.
- Qualifying expertise. The more detailed the description, the more case studies or actual experience cited, the more the LLMs credit your expertise. Licenses, customer quotes, awards, years in business—what is it about you that makes you a better choice than the competition?
There is also the structure of the content that can help. Properly structured H tags, JSON schema, even llms.txt (not yet a standard) can all help. This falls under the category of good hygiene. The LLMs are very good at parsing HTML content, but the easier you can make it to consume, the better off you are. We’ve had LLM responses to our queries that highlight the benefits of well-structured content.
Cultivate Third-Party Content
That #3—Qualifying Expertise—has to come from more than just your site. It also has to show up on relevant third-party sites. In the world of SEO, link building is a major signal, and developing a well-rounded link profile is important. For AEO/LLM visibility, appearing on highly relevant sites that attest to your company’s qualifications and expertise is very important.
The LLMs are not checking whether there are a bunch of links to your site. They are looking for reputable websites recognizing your expertise, professionalism, or other traits that speak to your business as a quality provider of the service.
Think sites like Houzz, HomeAdvisor, Angi, or other vertical-specific sites.
Reviews and Ratings
Broadly, encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews. Ratings are good, but reviews that speak to your services are better. The LLMs are looking for context, and reviews provide that.
Google Business Profile
Be sure your GBP is filled out and accurate. Set your territories/areas served and all your services. At some point, the Google Business Profile will feed into the LLMs’ decision-making process.
Closing Thoughts on LLMs & Local Business
When you query the LLMs, you’ll notice that they are very different in how they answer questions and where they source their information. For discovery, Claude starts with Brave Search, Gemini with Google, and ChatGPT with Bing. These search engines are the source of the shortlist for many local business recommendations. The LLMs then use third-party websites, but not the same ones. They reference reviews, but again, not the same ones. They may even use different sites depending on the context.
The overarching point is that a successful AEO strategy is broad in scope. It means keeping content across multiple channels up to date, revisiting the LLMs to see how they change, and adjusting accordingly.