There is no submission form and no way to pay for it. AI assistants recommend businesses they can find, parse and corroborate — which in practice means solid SEO fundamentals, pages that answer questions directly, and consistent verifiable information about your business across the web. Google is explicit on the first point: its guidance for site owners states the AI features in Search are built on the same core ranking systems as always, and that no special AI files or markup are required to appear in them.
This guide separates what genuinely helps from what the emerging "AEO" industry is guessing at. We will be straight about which is which.
Why This Is Worth Your Attention
The behaviour change is real and measurable. A Pew Research Center study of actual browsing behaviour found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result on just 8% of visits, against 15% when no summary appeared — and clicked a source cited inside the summary only 1% of the time. It is US data, but the mechanics travel.
Meanwhile OpenAI, with the National Bureau of Economic Research, published the largest study to date of real ChatGPT usage — over 1.5 million messages. Nearly 80% falls into practical guidance, seeking information and writing help, and around half of all messages are people asking for information or advice rather than asking the tool to make something.
Put together: a growing share of "who should I hire?" now gets answered by a machine naming three businesses. There is no second page to be on.
Step 1: Find Out What AI Already Says About You
Before changing anything, get a baseline. Open ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot and ask the questions your customers would:
- "Who are the best [your trade] in [your city]?"
- "I need a [your service] in [your suburb] — who should I call?"
- "Tell me about [your business name]"
- "How much does [your service] cost in New Zealand?"
Write down what comes back. Three outcomes are possible, and each points somewhere different:
- You are not mentioned. Usually a visibility and corroboration problem — the models have nothing to go on.
- You are mentioned with wrong details. Inconsistent information across the web. Highest-priority fix, because wrong details actively cost you calls.
- You are mentioned correctly. Good. Now work on being described the way you would choose.
Repeat this quarterly. It is the only feedback loop available, since none of these tools give you a Search Console equivalent.
Step 2: Fix the Fundamentals First
This is the unglamorous part that matters most, and it is why we are cautious about treating AEO as a separate discipline. Google's own position is that its AI features run on the same core ranking systems as regular Search. If your site cannot be crawled, is not indexed, or is too slow to be pleasant, no AI-specific tactic compensates.
So the prerequisites are exactly the ones in our SEO checklist: indexable pages, unique descriptive titles, real content per service, decent speed, mobile-first. Do those before anything below.
Step 3: Write So a Machine Can Extract Your Answer
This is the highest-leverage content change, and it happens to make your pages better for humans too.
AI systems pull passages, not pages. A paragraph that spends four sentences building context before reaching the point is a paragraph that gets skipped in favour of a competitor who led with the answer.
Lead with the answer
If the heading is a question, the first sentence answers it. Then explain, qualify and add nuance. Journalists call it burying the lede; here it is simply expensive.
Use question-shaped headings
Write the heading the way a customer would ask it. "How much does a bathroom renovation cost in Auckland?" rather than "Pricing considerations". The match between question and heading is doing real work.
Add a genuine FAQ section
Collect the questions you actually get asked on the phone and answer them plainly on the relevant page. Each question-and-answer pair is a self-contained extractable unit. Keep answers complete enough to stand alone — an answer that only makes sense after reading three paragraphs above it cannot be lifted.
Publish real numbers
Openly published pricing, timeframes and specifics are quotable. "Contact us for a quote" is not. If you can publish a range and the conditions attached to it, you become the source that gets cited for a question thousands of people ask.
Step 4: Make Your Business Facts Consistent and Corroborated
This is where most NZ small businesses have the biggest, cheapest win available.
AI assistants cross-reference. When deciding whether to recommend you, they are effectively checking whether several independent places agree about who you are. So make them agree:
- Identical business name, address, phone and hours on your website, your Google Business Profile, your social profiles and every directory
- A clear plain-language description of what you do and where you operate, in the same terms everywhere
- Genuine reviews, since they are among the most corroborated signals about a business
- Real mentions elsewhere — industry bodies, suppliers, local media, sponsorships
An old phone number on a directory you forgot about is not a small tidiness issue. It is a contradiction that makes you a riskier thing to recommend.
Step 5: Add Structured Data
Schema markup states your facts in a format that requires no interpretation — LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, Article. It is invisible to visitors.
Two honest caveats. Google says no special markup is needed for its AI features specifically. And FAQPage markup no longer produces the FAQ rich results people remember — Google restricted those to authoritative government and health sites in 2023. We still recommend schema, because being unambiguous about your own facts is cheap and durable, but do not expect a visible change in how your listing looks.
Step 6: The Unproven Extras
Here we will be blunt, because plenty of people are selling certainty that does not exist yet.
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file summarising your site for language models. It is trivially cheap to publish — we publish one — but it is not an established standard adopted by the major AI companies, and Google has explicitly said it does not need special AI files. Publish it if you like, on the basis that it costs an hour and might help. Do not let anyone bill you meaningfully for it.
"AI visibility" tracking tools are a young category. AI answers vary between users, sessions and phrasings, which makes rank-style reporting far shakier than the equivalent in search. Treat dashboards with appropriate suspicion, and prefer asking the questions yourself.
Anyone guaranteeing AI recommendations is not being straight with you. There is no index to submit to, no ranking to buy, and no mechanism through which such a promise could be kept.
Common Mistakes
- Treating AEO as separate from SEO. The fundamentals are shared; Google says so directly.
- Publishing thin AI-written content at volume. It reads as generic to both machines and people, and dilutes the pages that were working.
- Fabricating credentials or numbers to look quotable. Contradicted claims damage exactly the corroboration you are trying to build.
- Ignoring your Business Profile. For local businesses it is the most heavily cross-referenced source you own.
- Expecting fast results. These systems reflect a slow-moving picture of your business across the web.
Do This Today
- Ask ChatGPT, AI Mode and Perplexity the four baseline questions and record the answers
- Correct any wrong detail you find, starting with phone number and hours
- Audit your name, address and phone across your site, profile and directories until they match exactly
- Pick your most important page and rewrite its opening sentence to answer its own heading
- Add a real FAQ section built from questions customers actually ask
- Publish a price range for at least one service, with the conditions attached
Where We Come In
The structural work — schema on every page, answer-first content architecture, machine-readable extras, consistent facts — is what we build in as standard rather than sell as an add-on. If you want the background on how these systems work rather than what to do about them, our guide to GEO covers the mechanics, and Is SEO Still Worth It in 2026? lays out the NZ evidence. If you would rather someone did it, that is our AI-ready website design.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT?
There is no submission process. ChatGPT surfaces businesses it can find and corroborate, so the work is making your business easy to find and consistently described: solid indexable SEO fundamentals, answer-first content, a complete Google Business Profile, genuine reviews, and identical business details everywhere they appear.
Do I need to add special files or markup for AI search?
Not for Google. Its guidance for site owners states the AI features in Search are built on the same core ranking systems and that no special AI files or markup are needed. Optional extras like llms.txt are cheap to publish but are not an established standard, so treat them as a low-cost experiment rather than a requirement.
Is AEO different from SEO?
Mostly it is SEO with more discipline about structure. The fundamentals are shared, and the genuine additions are writing answer-first, using question-shaped headings, publishing real specifics, and keeping your business facts consistent enough to be corroborated.
Can I pay to be recommended by an AI assistant?
No. There is no index to submit to and no placement to buy in the organic answers, so anyone guaranteeing AI recommendations cannot deliver what they are promising. Google has begun placing ads inside AI Overviews, but that is advertising, clearly separate from being cited as a source.
How will I know if it is working?
Ask the assistants yourself, on a schedule, and keep notes. AI answers vary between users and phrasings, so third-party "AI rank tracking" is considerably less reliable than search-rank reporting. The durable signal is whether you are named, and whether the details given are correct.
Next in this series: How to Speed Up a Slow Website (and What It Costs You).