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A growing share of your future customers will never see a list of ten blue links. They'll ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews a question — "who's a good property manager in Kelowna?" or "how much should social media management cost?" — and receive a direct answer, often with two or three businesses named in it.
Getting your business into those answers is the newest discipline in marketing, sometimes called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). The good news: most of it builds on SEO fundamentals you should be doing anyway, and because so few small businesses are doing it deliberately, early movers gain an outsized edge.
AI assistants pull from two sources: what their models learned during training, and what they retrieve from live web searches at the moment you ask. For local and commercial questions, live retrieval dominates — the assistant runs a search behind the scenes, reads the top results, and synthesizes an answer with citations. That means the path into AI answers runs through familiar territory: being clearly written, easily crawled, and frequently corroborated on the open web.
Check your robots.txt file. Many websites unknowingly block AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot — usually because a plugin or developer added blanket bot rules years ago. If a crawler can't read your site, you're invisible to that assistant's live answers. Allowing AI crawlers is a one-line change with a large payoff. You can also experiment with an llms.txt file — a plain-text summary of who you are and what your key pages contain. This is an emerging proposal that some AI systems may read, so treat it as a low-effort experiment worth trying while the standard is still taking shape.
AI assistants love content structured as direct answers. For each service you offer, publish pages and posts that open with the question as a heading and answer it plainly in the first paragraph — pricing questions especially. "How much does property management cost in [city]?" answered with real numbers is the kind of content assistants quote verbatim. Vague content gets skipped; specific content gets cited.
Schema (structured data) labels your content so machines can parse it with certainty: LocalBusiness schema for your company details, FAQPage schema for question sections, BlogPosting for articles. Assistants and the search engines feeding them lean on schema to confirm facts like your service area, hours, and offerings before repeating them to a user.
AI systems build their understanding of your business from every mention across the web. If your name, address, and phone number vary from site to site — or worse, your name overlaps with an unrelated company — assistants can blend the two identities together and cite the wrong one. Use your exact, full business name everywhere: website, directories, social profiles, review sites. Distinctive and consistent beats short and ambiguous.
Assistants weigh corroboration heavily. A business described the same way on its own site, its Google Business Profile, Yelp, industry directories, local news, and a chamber of commerce page reads as established and safe to recommend. Build citations on the directories that matter for your industry, pursue local press when you have a genuine story, and treat every review platform as a source AI reads — because it does. Reviews carry particular weight for "who's the best…" questions; our guide to getting more online reviews shows how to build that pipeline.
Google Search Console gets most of the attention, and ChatGPT Search may draw on third-party search providers rather than Google alone. Because the exact sources behind any given AI answer can shift, keeping your business visible across both Google and Bing is the safer approach. Registering with Bing Webmaster Tools takes about five minutes, and you can import your settings directly from Search Console — a small step that widens where your content can be discovered.
Watch for referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, and gemini.google.com in your analytics — assistants increasingly link their sources. Re-run your test questions monthly. AEO compounds the same way SEO does: slow for a quarter, then suddenly you're the business the machines recommend. Pair this work with the fundamentals in our guide to getting found on Google without paying for ads — the two disciplines feed each other.
DOPE Marketing Solutions builds done-for-you marketing for small businesses and property management companies. Take the 60-second quiz to find the package that fits your goals and budget.
No fluff. No jargon. Just one actionable tip every week to help your business get found and grow online.
