Want AI to Recommend Your Business? Start With the Marketing Fundamentals

Want your business to show up when someone asks AI for a recommendation?

People are changing the way they search.

Instead of typing “Knoxville marketing company” or “plumber near me” into a traditional search box and working through a page of results, someone can now ask:

“Who is a good plumber near me?”

“Recommend a custom home builder in my area.”

“Who can help a small business with its marketing?”

ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google’s AI search experiences and other tools can answer those questions directly.

Naturally, that has created an entire new conversation around AI search optimization, AEO, GEO and how businesses can get recommended.

But after working in social and digital marketing since 2011, I am less interested in giving business owners another acronym to worry about.

I’m more interested in this question:

What actually deserves your attention?

The answer is surprisingly familiar.

Research provided through Agency Platform looked at 31,495 local-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. The businesses that appeared more consistently tended to have many of the same fundamentals we have been talking about in search marketing for years: complete business information, strong reviews, useful website content, consistent information across the web and enough credibility for a search system to understand exactly who they are and what they do.

Google’s own current guidance points in much the same direction. For its AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google says the same foundational SEO practices continue to matter and that website owners do not need special AI files, special AI markup or an entirely separate optimization system.

In other words:

AI is changing how people find information. It has not made good marketing fundamentals obsolete.

Here is where I would start.

1. Make it very clear who your business is and what you do

This sounds almost too basic to matter.

It matters.

Your website, Google Business Profile and major online listings should agree about basic facts such as your business name, location or service area, phone number, hours and services.

Google recommends keeping Business Profile information complete and accurate, including address or service area, hours, category and business attributes.

Think about this from an AI system’s perspective.

If one site calls you one thing, another uses an old phone number, your website describes your services differently and your Google profile has outdated hours, a machine has to decide whether those references represent the same business and whether the information is trustworthy.

Don’t make it work that hard.

This is one of those marketing jobs that isn’t particularly exciting, but before I would recommend creating another month of content, I would make sure the basics are correct.

2. Treat your Google Business Profile like part of your website

For a local business, your Google Business Profile may be one of the most visible pieces of your online presence.

And yet plenty of businesses treat it as something they set up years ago and rarely look at again.

Review your categories. Check your services. Confirm your hours. Update photos. Make sure your description still reflects what the business actually does.

And then maintain it.

Google itself recommends providing complete Business Profile information and keeping it current. It also says verified Business Profiles can help customers find a business and build trust.

This matters beyond traditional Maps searches.

Google’s current guidance for its generative AI search experiences specifically recommends keeping Business Profile information up to date.

That’s an important distinction.

You aren’t maintaining your Business Profile because somebody invented a new AEO checklist.

You’re maintaining it because it is one of the places search systems use to understand your business.

3. Build a steady review habit instead of occasionally asking for a pile of reviews

Reviews do several jobs at once.

They help a prospective customer decide whether they trust you.

They give search platforms additional information about your business.

And they provide something many businesses overlook: customer language.

Pay attention to what people actually say when they describe working with you.

Do they repeatedly mention a particular service?

A problem you solved?

Something about your process?

A reason they chose you?

Those phrases can tell you a lot about what matters to your customers and how they describe the value you provide.

That’s valuable input for your website copy, FAQs, service pages and content.

I would also make responding to reviews part of the process. Google recommends replying to customer feedback and says helpful responses can help a business stand out.

Don’t turn those replies into a keyword exercise.

Answer like a person.

Useful, specific and relevant beats copying the same generic “Thank you for your five-star review!” response fifty times.

4. Answer the questions your customers are already asking

This may be one of the biggest opportunities for small businesses.

A lot of websites still say some version of:

“We provide exceptional service and customized solutions to meet your unique needs.”

That could belong to thousands of businesses.

It also answers almost nothing.

Instead, think about the actual questions someone asks before hiring you.

How does your process work?

How much does it cost?

How long does it take?

What happens first?

Who is this service right for?

What is the difference between two options?

What should someone know before making the decision?

Your website should answer those questions directly.

This is useful for traditional SEO because it creates pages around real search intent.

It is also useful in AI-driven discovery because answer systems are trying to find information that addresses a user’s specific question.

The Agency Platform research provided to resellers found that direct, answer-first content was cited more consistently than generic copy in its sample.

I wouldn’t interpret that as permission to manufacture hundreds of thin FAQ pages.

I’d interpret it as a reminder to be more useful.

If a customer asks you the same question repeatedly, there is probably a useful piece of website content hiding in that conversation.

5. Make your website easy for machines to understand, too

Good writing matters.

So does the structure underneath it.

Your website should use clear page titles, logical headings, descriptive URLs, internal links and appropriate structured data.

For a local business, LocalBusiness structured data can help Google understand information about the business, including details such as location and hours. Google also provides Organization structured-data guidance for helping it understand an organization’s identity and online presence.

But this is where I would be careful with some of the AI optimization advice floating around online.

You do not need to start stuffing your website with mysterious “AI schema.”

Google specifically says there is no special schema.org structured data required to appear in its AI Overviews or AI Mode. Structured data should accurately represent information that is actually visible on the page.

That is the kind of distinction I care about.

Use technology to make your content clearer.

Don’t add technology simply because somebody has made it sound urgent.

6. Build a reputation that exists beyond your own website

Your website tells people what you say about your business.

The rest of the internet helps establish whether anyone else knows you exist.

That can include reviews, business directories, professional associations, local organizations, media coverage, community involvement, industry websites, podcasts and other credible mentions.

The Agency Platform research found outside brand mentions were strongly associated with AI citations in its sample.

I would not turn that finding into “backlinks don’t matter anymore.” That’s a bigger conclusion than the research supports.

I would take a more useful lesson from it:

Your online authority shouldn’t exist entirely on your own domain.

Strong businesses tend to leave evidence behind.

Customers talk about them. Organizations mention them. Their expertise appears in other places. Their information is consistent from one credible source to another.

That is good reputation building whether the next customer discovers you through Google, ChatGPT, a referral or an industry directory.

7. Don’t expect AI visibility to happen overnight

One of the least exciting truths about marketing is that credibility compounds.

A complete website published yesterday doesn’t instantly develop the same footprint as a business that has been consistently adding useful pages, earning reviews, receiving mentions and keeping its information accurate for years.

That doesn’t mean you need to publish something every day.

It means you should stop treating your website and search presence like one-time projects.

Update information when it changes.

Add useful content when you have something worth answering.

Collect reviews as part of your normal customer process.

Improve pages instead of abandoning them.

Add proof when you earn it.

A sustainable body of useful information is much more valuable than a short burst of content created because AI search suddenly became the topic everyone is talking about.

What I would fix first

If a business owner asked me, “What should I do this week to improve my chances of being found in search and AI recommendations?” I would not begin by selling them a complicated AI optimization project.

I would start with an audit of the fundamentals.

Check whether your Google Business Profile is complete and current. Compare your business name, contact information, hours and services everywhere they appear. Look at your recent reviews and unanswered reviews. Read your main website pages as if you were a prospective customer who knows nothing about you. Then write down the ten questions customers ask you most often and see how many your website actually answers.

Only after that would I decide what new content, technical work or larger strategy deserves attention.

That’s the part of AI marketing I think too many conversations skip.

New technology can change where the opportunity appears without changing what makes a business trustworthy.

Does Google penalize content written with AI?

Not simply because AI was involved.

Google’s current guidance says generative AI can be useful for researching and structuring original content. What can create problems is producing large amounts of content primarily to manipulate rankings without adding meaningful value for users.

That is also why I don’t believe the answer is to ask AI to write fifty blog posts and publish them without review.

AI can help research, organize, outline, draft and repurpose.

Experience still has to decide what is true, useful and worth publishing.

That’s how I use it in my own work.

Is AEO different from SEO?

Sometimes the terminology is useful because it reminds us that people increasingly receive answers rather than simply pages of links.

But I would be careful about treating AEO, GEO or “AI SEO” as an entirely separate universe.

For Google’s own generative search features, Google says traditional SEO fundamentals remain relevant and there are no additional technical requirements for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode.

The practical opportunity is to make your information easier to retrieve, understand and trust.

Clear answers. Strong pages. Accurate business information. Useful structure. Real expertise. Evidence beyond your own claims.

Those are not bad investments regardless of what we call them.

Can you guarantee that ChatGPT or another AI tool will recommend your business?

No.

And I would be skeptical of anyone promising that they can.

Different AI systems use different models, search systems, data sources and retrieval methods. Results can also change based on the wording of the question, location, available sources and updates to the underlying product.

Optimization can improve the quality, clarity and credibility of the information available about your business.

It cannot guarantee a particular AI answer.

That is an important difference.

AI search is worth paying attention to. Panic isn’t required.

The way people discover businesses is changing.

That deserves attention.

But before you create another marketing project because somebody told you AI changed everything, check whether the marketing you already have clearly tells both people and search systems:

Who are you?

What do you do?

Who do you help?

Where do you do it?

What questions can you answer?

What evidence shows that people trust you?

If those answers are difficult to find, that’s where I would start.

Because the goal isn’t to “optimize for AI.”

The goal is to build a business presence that is easy to understand, useful enough to reference and credible enough to recommend.

Your marketing doesn’t need another layer of random tactics.

Inside Marketing Circle, we sort through what actually deserves your attention, what can wait, and what you can realistically finish.

If your marketing feels scattered or you keep wondering which new thing you’re supposed to be doing next, come join us.

This post was last updated September 2026