Get Recommended by ChatGPT & Google AI

The behaviour shift is straightforward. Instead of typing paver patio contractor Phoenix and scanning ten blue links, a homeowner now asks an assistant what a paver patio should cost, what to ask a contractor, and who is reputable nearby. They arrive at your name already briefed, or they never arrive at all.

That changes what winning looks like. In classic search you compete for a position. In an AI answer there is no position to hold; there is a paragraph, and either your business is named in it or the conversation ends without you. There is no second page to be on.

It also compresses the shortlist. A search results page offers ten options. An assistant typically offers three. Being the fourth-best documented contractor in your market used to mean less traffic. Increasingly it means none from that channel.

The encouraging part is that almost nobody in this trade is optimising for it yet. The contractors getting cited are usually the ones who published straightforward answers to ordinary questions before anyone thought of it as a strategy.

Month one. Baseline. We run the questions your buyers actually ask across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini, and record who gets named today. Usually it is national lead-generation sites and two local competitors.

Months two and three. The mechanical work. Schema markup so machines can read what your pages are about, an llms.txt file describing your business in plain terms, entity details wired to your Google Business Profile and other verified profiles. This is the foundation and it moves fastest.

Months three to six. Answer-shaped content. Direct question headings with a complete answer in the first forty words, because that is the shape assistants lift from. Cost guidance, material comparisons and process explanations are what get quoted; sales copy never is.

Ongoing. Re-testing the same question set every month and reporting where you now appear. Assistant answers move around more than rankings do, so the trend across a quarter matters more than any single check.

The honest position is that AI visibility has no equivalent of a ranking report, and anyone showing you a tidy position number for ChatGPT is inventing it. What can be measured is whether you get named, and how often.

We keep a fixed set of questions for your market, the ones a homeowner would genuinely ask before hiring. Each month those run across the major assistants and we record three things: whether your business is mentioned, whether your site is cited as a source, and who is named instead when you are not. That third column is the useful one, because it tells you exactly what the assistant currently considers authoritative.

Alongside that we track referral traffic from assistant domains in analytics, which is small but growing and, more to the point, converts unusually well. Someone arriving from an assistant has already been told you are a reasonable choice.

AEO is included in the Comprehensive Growth Program at $3,499 a month. It works best layered on existing SEO, because assistants draw heavily on pages that already rank.

If your site does not rank organically for much yet, start with SEO. Assistants overwhelmingly cite pages that already perform in search, so AEO on a site with no organic footing has very little to work with.

If you need booked work this quarter, this is not the channel. AI referral volume is genuine and growing but still small next to Local Services Ads. AEO is a position you take now because it is cheap to take now, not a tap you turn on for immediate leads.