What Is AEO? Answer Engine Optimization for Small Business

A few weeks ago a woman I had never met emailed me about branding her new business. When I asked how she found Vagari Creative, she said she asked ChatGPT. Not Google. Not Instagram. She typed a question into a chatbot, it named my studio, and she booked a call. (The full story is coming in a separate post next week.)

I have spent years thinking about Google rankings and almost none thinking about this, which is a mildly embarrassing thing to admit in a post about marketing.

The short version

When someone searches Google, they get a list of links. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, or the AI summary that now sits at the top of Google, they get one written answer. If your business is in that answer, you have a shot at a new client. If it is not, you were never in the running. That shift, from showing up in a list to being named in an answer, is what people mean by AEO, answer engine optimization.

You still need your website to show up in regular search. AEO does not replace that. It sits next to it.

How big is this

A Pew Research Center survey from February 2026 found that 44% of U.S. adults now use ChatGPT. Pew’s 2023 figure was 18%, though the question wording changed between surveys, so treat the jump as a rough guide, not an exact doubling. Searching for information was among the most common reasons people gave for using chatbots, and 60% of adults said they had read the AI summary at the top of a Google search result. Those numbers are growing fast.

The honest answer is that AI referral traffic is still small. One large study by SE Ranking found that AI assistants sent about 0.32% of web traffic in 2026, up from 0.02% in 2024. But that number probably misses some of the real effect, because some people who hear your name from an AI assistant will type it into Google or go straight to your website rather than clicking the chatbot’s link. The referral never shows up in analytics, but the client still came from the AI. That is my read, not a research finding.

What makes an AI name your business

The research we pulled on this points in a consistent direction, though none of it is a guaranteed formula. The businesses that tend to get named are the ones whose websites say specific things in plain language. Not clever taglines, not stock marketing copy, but facts: who you serve, where you are, what the work includes.

A Princeton-led study on generative engine optimization tested ways of changing a page to see how often an AI engine would cite it. Adding cited sources, quotations, and statistics increased visibility by up to about 40% compared with a baseline, while stuffing in keywords did little. The study used a simulated engine built on an older model, so I treat it as a direction, not a guarantee. An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found that the strongest correlation with appearing in Google’s AI answers was how often a brand gets mentioned elsewhere on the web (correlation of 0.664), well above backlinks alone. Ahrefs notes this is correlation on established sites, not causation.

Google’s own guidance says there are no special requirements to appear in AI Overviews, and no special markup is needed. It points to the usual fundamentals: pages that can be crawled, important content in text, good internal links, and an up-to-date Business Profile.

Our read of all of this: be specific, be findable, say the thing plainly. That is our reasoning, built on what the research suggests, not a promise.

What this looks like on a real website

When we build a site for a client at Vagari Creative, these go in on purpose:

An FAQ with direct, plain-language answers to the questions your clients ask before they hire you.
Title tags and meta descriptions written for the service and the location, not for cleverness.
A sitemap, clean URLs, and a structure that is easy for both people and crawlers to read.
Blog posts that answer the questions your customers are searching, not posts about why branding matters in the abstract.
Pages that lead with the answer, cite a source for every statistic, and carry a date and an author on articles.

Our Launch package also includes Google Business Profile setup. None of this is a guarantee, because the assistants change their answers from one day to the next.

One thing you can do this week

Pull up your own website on your phone. Read the homepage as if you had never heard of your business. Does it say, in the first few seconds, who you serve, where you are, and what you do? If a chatbot were reading that page and someone asked “who does [your service] in [your town],” would there be enough there to name you?

If the answer is no, that is worth a conversation.

By Michelle Samson. Numbers in this post were checked on October 14, 2026.

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