Getting found by AI search: what's real, what's hype, and what's already handled

A growing share of the questions your customers used to type into a search box are now typed into something that answers back. They ask an assistant who repairs a wobbly dining chair near them, or which clinic treats a particular problem, or they never leave Google at all because the summary at the top of the page told them enough.

This has produced a new category of advice, a new set of acronyms — GEO, AEO — and a new tier of agency retainer. A good deal of it is the old advice with new vocabulary.

But some of it is genuinely different, and the difference changes what a good page looks like. Here's the honest version: what actually changed, what's already handled underneath your site, and the part that's yours.

What actually changed

Classic search returns a ranked list of links, and what you're competing for is a click. An answer engine returns a written answer, and what you're competing for is a citation — being one of the few sources it was assembled from, and named as one. That single shift has consequences:

• It reads in fragments. A search engine indexes your page; an answer engine lifts passages out of it. Whatever it takes has to make sense on its own.
• It rewards precision over persuasion. “Award-winning craftsmanship” is unquotable. “We've made hand-cut oak staircases in Bristol since 2011” is a fact an answer can be built from.
• Ambiguity is fatal rather than untidy. A visitor works out that the hours in your footer are newer than the ones on your contact page. A machine picks one, and it might pick the wrong one.
• Volume is lower, intent is higher. Nobody asks an assistant a question idly. This traffic arrives in small numbers and unusually far along in deciding.

The old game was being findable. The new one is being quotable. The reassuring part is that nearly everything which makes you quotable already made you findable.

Established, plausible, and hype

The field is young enough that confident claims deserve suspicion, including the ones made in its favour. Three tiers are worth separating, because most of what you'll be sold blurs them deliberately:

• Established. Answer engines retrieve from a crawled index. Without a crawlable site, a sitemap, and HTML containing your words before any JavaScript runs, you're not in the pool at all. Explicit factual sentences get quoted; marketing prose doesn't.
• Reasonable, but unproven. Structured data. How much weight machine-readable markup carries inside an LLM's retrieval isn't public, and anyone quoting you a number is guessing. Worth doing anyway, because it's unambiguously required for classic rich results — the same work serves both. A cheap hedge, not a lever.
• Mostly hype. Files like llms.txt, sold as a way to hand instructions to AI crawlers. Adoption by the major engines is close to nonexistent. We haven't built a feature around it, and we'd rather tell you that than charge for it.

The machine-readable layer, already handled

As with classic SEO, a large share of this is infrastructure, and on a managed platform it isn't your job. Every site gets it, on every plan, with nothing to switch on:

• Pages rendered on the server. Your words are in the HTML before any JavaScript runs. This matters more here than for Google: a retriever may never execute a line of script, so a site whose content appears only after the page “boots” is invisible to it.
• A sitemap of your own, kept current as you add pages and posts. It knows published from scheduled, so a post dated next month isn't advertised today, and it leaves out any page you've hidden.
• A robots file that names the AI crawlers. GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are each welcomed by name rather than by omission, so the intent is legible to anyone who reads the file — including you.
• One canonical address per page. Your site answers at your own domain and at its platform address; each page declares which is the real one. Two addresses for one page is exactly the ambiguity that costs you.
• Its own title and description on every page, rather than one set repeated site-wide, plus a per-page switch to hide a page from search entirely.
• Nothing at all while you're building. A site in Trial, or set to Opening Soon, tells every crawler to stay out. Your half-finished draft can't be quoted back at you.

Your own data, made machine-readable

Answer engines ground what they say in facts, and favour facts stated unambiguously. On most website builders, publishing those in machine-readable form means buying an SEO plugin and re-typing everything into it — prices, opening hours, ratings — then re-typing it again whenever something changes.

Your site already holds all of it in structured form, because that's what runs your shop and your bookings. So the markup is generated from your own records, and it stays right because it isn't a copy:

• Your business as an entity — name, description, logo. Add a location and it upgrades: postal address, map coordinates, phone, email, and opening hours day by day, which is exactly what “are they open now?” gets answered from.
• Your products — price and currency, stock, brand, SKU, images, and once there are reviews, the average rating and the number behind it. Products with variants advertise the lowest live price.
• Your journal, with a real human attached — date, cover image, and the author as an actual person: name, job title, photograph and biography, read live from that member's profile. Named, pictured authorship is among the clearer signals an engine weighs when deciding whose account to repeat.
• Your FAQs — every question and answer, published in question-and-answer form. Of everything here it's the highest-value surface you have, for a reason almost too obvious: it's already shaped like an answer.

Write things that survive being lifted out

Here's the part that's yours, and it's mercifully small.

Put the fact inside the sentence

Write so that any single sentence still means something on its own. Pronouns and callbacks are what break this: “we've been doing it for over twenty years” is worthless once lifted; “Ashford & Co has fitted bespoke wardrobes in Bristol since 2003” travels. Read a paragraph and ask which sentence you'd want quoted back at a stranger; if the answer is “none of them,” that's the note.

Answer the questions you actually get asked

Put an FAQ section on the pages that need one and fill it with real questions from your inbox and your phone calls — not “What makes you different?” but “how long is the wait for a first appointment?” and “do you deliver to the islands, and what does it cost?”

Answer each in two or three plain sentences with the specifics in them — the number, the timeframe, the price, the condition. It's the highest-return hour of work available to most sites right now, and it doubles as the thing you stop having to answer by email.

Say the boring things plainly

What you do, where you are, what you charge, when you're open, what area you cover. Keep your poetic headline — but the plain version has to exist on the page too, worded the same way everywhere you appear, directories included. Inconsistency is what produces a confidently wrong answer about you.

Beyond that, the advice in our SEO guide applies twice over: a few useful posts a quarter, each answering one real question properly, compounds. A three-hundred-word honest answer is exactly the shape of thing that gets retrieved.

Local questions are where this pays first

If you serve an area, this is where you'll see it soonest. “Who does X near me, and are they any good?” is nearly the perfect question for an answer engine — it turns entirely on facts that can be checked: an address, hours, a rating, a phone number.

So add your locations properly. Full address, coordinates, phone, and hours for each day rather than “open most afternoons.” Each gets its own page at its own clean address, which is what a local question lands on. Keep every detail identical to your Google Business Profile and your directory listings, and collect reviews on your site and off it. None of that is new advice — it's the same advice with sharper teeth.

If you'd rather stay out of it

Some people don't want their words feeding an AI product, and that's a position rather than a misunderstanding. There's a single switch for it in your site settings, under Search & AI visibility. Two honest caveats, because this is an area where settings screens routinely overpromise:

• It blocks the named AI crawlers only, and leaves ordinary search alone. A blanket block would remove you from Google altogether, which is emphatically not what “don't train on my content” means.
• Google AI Overviews can't be opted out of separately. The Google-Extended control governs whether your content trains Gemini; AI Overviews are built by ordinary Googlebot, so the only way out is to leave Google's index entirely. Anyone claiming otherwise is describing a switch that doesn't exist.

The same card holds your Search Console and Bing verification codes, and links to your live sitemap and robots file so you can read exactly what's being served in your name.

What to ignore

As in the SEO guide, the do-not-do list carries as much value as the do list:

• Guaranteed citations, and anything sold as a private technique. Nobody controls which sources an answer is assembled from, the mechanism isn't public, and the engines change monthly. It's the same email that used to promise page one, with the nouns changed.
• Writing for the machine. Prose stuffed with question-shaped headings and robotic repetition reads badly to humans, and humans are still the ones who buy from you.
• AI-generated filler. A hundred thin posts written by a machine to be read by a machine is a strategy with nobody in it. Volume was a weak play in classic SEO; it's weaker when the reward is being worth quoting.
• Rebuilding your site for it. If your pages load quickly, say true things clearly, and read well on a phone, you've already done most of this.

Measuring a thing that has no rank

There's no position to track. A citation isn't a number, it differs from person to person, and it may never produce a click at all. Two things are worth doing, and neither takes long.

Watch your dashboard for referrals from assistant domains. They show up like any other source and the numbers will be small; judge them on what those visitors do, not how many arrive.

Then, once a quarter, ask an assistant about your own business. What it does and doesn't know is a free and genuinely useful content audit. If it gets your hours wrong, your hours are wrong somewhere. If it can't say what you do, neither can your home page.

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The honest summary

AI SEO is roughly eighty per cent classic SEO; the other twenty per cent is writing more plainly than you're used to.

Be crawlable and quick to load (handled). Publish your facts in a form a machine can read (handled, from data you already keep). State plainly what you do, where you are and what it costs (yours). Answer real questions in real sentences, with the specifics inside them (yours). Keep your hours, prices and stock accurate, because they're being repeated on your behalf now (yours).

No retainer, no acronym, and no technique that stops working when the next model ships — because “be accurate, specific and readable” can't be patched out.

Start with one FAQ section on your busiest page this week. Ten real questions, answered honestly, with the numbers in them. It's the best hour available to most sites right now, and it was worth doing before any of this happened.