AEO explained: how to get your business named by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews

More customers now ask an AI assistant "who is the best dentist near me?" and read a single answer instead of ten links. If your business is not in that answer, it is invisible to those customers. The practice of making your business easy for AI assistants to find, understand and quote is called AEO, short for answer engine optimisation.

How AI answers tend to be built

The details differ between ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, and they change often. In general, they draw on web sources and search indexes, work out which businesses are the relevant entities, and weigh signals such as how consistently a business is described and how often it is mentioned or reviewed.

1. Be unmistakably clear about who you are

Use the same business name, description, services and location across your website, Google profile, LinkedIn and directories. If different sources describe you differently, assistants have less to be confident about.

2. Answer real questions on your website

Create pages and FAQs that answer what customers actually ask, such as "how long does scaling take?" or "do you offer weekend appointments?". Put a short, direct answer first, then the detail. Assistants and AI summaries prefer content they can quote cleanly.

3. Use structured data

Structured data (schema) is code that tells machines what a page is about. Mark up your business details, services and FAQs. It helps search engines and AI tools parse your information correctly.

4. Consider an llms.txt file

llms.txt is a plain text file at the root of a website that gives AI tools a short summary of who you are. It is a proposed convention, and no major assistant has confirmed that it relies on it. It costs almost nothing to add, so we include it, but it is not a magic switch.

5. Earn mentions and reviews

Reviews, local press, partner pages and relevant directories all give assistants more reasons to trust you. For a Singapore business, Google reviews and local industry directories are a good place to start.

6. Keep your site fast and crawlable

Make sure your important pages load quickly and are not blocked by mistake in your robots.txt file. If an assistant cannot read your site, it cannot learn from it.

7. Measure by asking

Once a month, ask the main assistants the questions your customers would ask, for example "best aircon servicing in Tampines". Write down who is named and why. Over time you will see whether your changes are working.

AEO is built on the same foundations as good SEO: clear information, helpful pages and a good reputation. If you do those well, you are already most of the way there.