More people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for recommendations instead of searching. AI search optimization makes sure your business is the answer they get.
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini each crawl the web with their own bots. I make sure yours welcomes all of them — robots.txt, llms.txt, and clean technical access.
Structured data (Schema.org) is the clearest machine-readable signal AI engines have. I mark up your business, services, FAQs, and content so AI understands exactly who you are.
AI engines quote pages that answer questions directly in the first sentences. I restructure your content into the declarative, citable format AI actually pulls from.
ChatGPT's search runs on Bing's index — a step most businesses skip entirely. I get you indexed and optimized where the AI engines actually look.
AI answers to "best X near me" are assembled from directories, reviews, and mentions across the web. I build the citation footprint AI engines trust.
Monthly checks of what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity actually say when asked about businesses like yours in Richmond — and what changed.
Search is splitting in two. Google still matters — but a growing share of your customers now ask an AI assistant instead: "who's a good masonry contractor near Richmond?" typed into ChatGPT gets one short answer with a few named businesses. Either you're in that answer or you don't exist.
Getting into AI answers is different from ranking on Google. AI engines favor pages that state facts plainly. They reward structured data they can parse. They pull from pages that answer the question in the first two sentences. And they trust businesses backed by consistent directories and reviews across the web. The overlap between Google's top ten and what AI engines cite is now less than 20%. This is a separate discipline — not a byproduct of SEO.
The upside is real: industry data shows visitors referred by AI assistants convert at roughly 4x the rate of traditional search traffic, because the AI already vetted you before sending them. Fewer clicks, better customers.
One-time setup: AI crawler audit and robots.txt/llms.txt configuration, full Schema.org markup (business entity, services, FAQs, articles), answer-first rewrites of your key pages, Bing Webmaster Tools indexing, and a baseline report of what each major AI engine currently says about your business.
Ongoing (part of the Growth Plan): monthly AI visibility checks across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, citation building in the sources AI engines pull from, fresh Q&A content targeting the questions customers actually ask AI, and date/freshness signals kept current — AI engines discount stale pages.
Honest expectations: nobody can guarantee placement inside an AI answer — anyone who promises that is guessing. What I can do is make your business maximally readable, verifiable, and citable, which is what every documented AI recommendation has in common. This is early-mover territory: most Richmond businesses haven't started, which is exactly why it works.
Already have a website that ranks? GEO builds on top of local SEO — the two share a foundation, and I bundle them.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) are the practice of optimizing your business to be cited and recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude — the way SEO optimizes for Google rankings.
SEO earns you a spot in a list of links. GEO earns you a mention inside the AI's answer itself. The tactics overlap maybe 20% — structured data, answer-first writing, and citation building matter far more for AI than backlinks and keywords do.
Directly: I ask the major AI engines the questions your customers ask — "best [your service] in Richmond" and variations — and track whether you're named, what's said, and how that changes month to month, alongside referral traffic from AI sources in your analytics.
Need? Not yet. Benefit from? Yes — especially now. AI recommendations tend to name only two or three businesses, the early data shows AI-referred visitors convert around 4x better, and almost no local competitors are optimizing for it. Early movers keep those slots.
Free consultation and website review — zero pressure, even if we never work together.
Get Your Free Review