Somewhere right now, your ideal customer is asking ChatGPT a question. “Who’s a good [what you do] near me?” The answer names three businesses. Yours isn’t one of them.
It’s not because you’re worse than the three that were named. It’s because the machine doing the recommending has never been given a reason to believe in you. And here’s the uncomfortable truth behind most SEO and AEO frustration: you can’t be recommended for something nobody said.
This is an honest guide to how I approach search visibility, in both traditional Google results and AI-generated answers. Most of it you can run yourself. I’ll be clear about where the hard parts are.
Why most SEO work doesn’t turn into customers
The problem is rarely SEO itself. It’s the order in which the work gets done.
A standard agency starts with an audit tool. It scans your site and produces a list: metadata, image compression, ALT tags, schema tweaks. All valid. None of them is the reason your phone isn’t ringing. Those fixes matter when you and your competitors are otherwise level, and you need a small lever to edge ahead. Most businesses aren’t there yet.
I’ve seen a business spend twelve months and £15,000 climbing to position five for a valuable local keyword. Then they looked at the actual results page. Above their listing sat four paid ads, a map pack, a directory carousel, and a People Also Ask box. They had proved the keyword ranked. Not that it brought customers.
The right starting point isn’t the keyword. It’s your customer.
Being found comes down to three things
Everything I do in SEO and AEO sits in one of three layers.
Layer one: what you say about yourself. Your website, your content, your FAQs, your videos. Fully within your control.
Layer two: what others say about you. Reviews, press coverage, podcasts, citations, lists, forum mentions, links. Partly within your influence.
Layer three: everything else. Site speed, review counts, content depth against a competitor covering the same ground. Marginal gains.
Most businesses obsess over layer three and fail at layers one and two. Get the first two right, and you’re ahead of most of your market before a single technical fix.
Layer one: what you say about yourself
Start with a deep understanding of the people you serve. Who are they? What are they actually trying to get done? What have they already tried, and why did it fail them? Where do you fit in their journey from A to B (or A to Z)?
This isn’t a branding exercise. It’s the raw material for everything the engines will ever know about you.
Could a stranger guess what you do from one line?
Here’s a pattern I see constantly. A business describes itself with something like “We revolutionise sound design.” What does a search engine do with that? What does a human do with that? Nothing. There’s no customer in it, no problem, no journey.
Now compare “Create Hollywood-grade sound in seconds.” From that one line, a machine (and a person) can infer who it’s for, what they aspire to, what normally blocks them, and what’s being promised. One sentence hands the engine a map to hang everything else on.
Test your own homepage the same way. Could a stranger, human or machine, read your headline (and copy) and guess who you serve and what changes for them? If not, that’s the first fix, and it costs nothing but thinking.
Why hiding your pricing and process backfires
The objection I hear most: “I don’t want to give away my process. I don’t want to publish my pricing.”
You now live in a world where the systems doing the recommending need knowledge about you to recommend you. Hiding isn’t protection. Hiding is invisibility.
If you run a service business, publish how you work with customers, what happens after the contract is signed, what the first month looks like. If you sell products, cover how it feels, what it weighs, how it’s packaged, what it costs, how you dispose of it. Everything a buyer wonders about at 11 pm should be answered on your site.
There’s a practical reason this works so well for AEO. People ask AI tools questions in natural language. Content structured as real questions with direct, complete answers is content a machine can lift straight into its response. Search engines rank pages; AI engines lift passages and compose answers. Write each section so it stands alone.
One more thing: consistency. If your website, LinkedIn, directory listings, and reviews describe you in contradictory ways, the machine’s confidence in you drops. Same story everywhere.
Layer two: what others say about you
First-party depth is the foundation, and nothing replaces it. But your narrative carries more weight when it’s repeated by voices you don’t control: a journalist covering your story, a customer’s detailed review, a podcast appearance, a genuinely helpful answer you gave in a forum thread, an influencer who actually uses what you sell. These carry weight precisely because you didn’t write them. When the engines find your own content and independent voices telling the same story, that’s corroboration, and that’s when recommendation confidence climbs.
Backlinks still work. Whatever anyone tells you, they remain strong signals. But building them honestly is harder than it used to be, and the systems for detecting manufactured ones are good.
So widen the frame beyond links. Think citations, mentions, and features. A “ten best [what you do] in [your city]” list compiled by an organisation that actually vets its entries. Trade press. A partner’s case study page. Local business awards. Podcasts in your niche.
Reverse-engineer it. Who needs to talk about you? Where do you need to appear? Who could credibly feature you? Some attempts will land, some won’t. The point is to actively work through the question rather than wait to be discovered.
And a rule for anything that feels like a shortcut, including dropping links into Reddit threads: if there’s any doubt in your head that it might be spam, it’s spam. It might work for a quarter. It will cost you for years. Be genuinely helpful or don’t post.
Reviews belong in this layer too. They’re third-party evidence, in customer language, that your layer-one story is true. Ask for them, respond to them, and never fake them.
Layer three: the small stuff that only matters once you’re tied
Yes, site speed matters. Yes, 550 reviews beats 500. Yes, deeper insight beats thinner coverage of the same topic. These things decide ties.
But you’re probably not in a tie. Most of your competitors haven’t done layers one and two properly, which means the tie-breakers aren’t your problem yet. Do the foundations first.
People don’t search once. They journey.
Nobody wakes up and types the perfect buying query. They start with a symptom, a frustration, a half-formed question. Something they read leads to something they watch, which mentions a product they ignore, then Google by name two days later.
That has two consequences for your content.
First, cover the journey, not just the destination. The early questions, the comparisons, the doubts, the “will this work for someone like me” anxieties. Whoever answers those earns the trust long before the buying query is typed.
Second, don’t measure only by the last click. The buyer may end up purchasing through Amazon, or walking into a shop, out of pure habit. But the content that taught them, reassured them, and put your name in their head did the selling. The endgame of all this work isn’t ranking for a keyword. It’s becoming the thing people search for by name.
Run it yourself: the honest sequence
- Have real customer conversations, regularly. Ask what was going on in their life before they found you, what they searched, what they doubted. This is the source everything else draws from.
- Fix your promise. One line a stranger could read and know who you serve and what changes for them.
- Answer everything. Publish the questions customers actually ask, in their words, with direct answers. Pricing included.
- Keep your story consistent across your site, profiles, and listings.
- Earn genuine third-party voices. Reviews, press, podcasts, lists, helpful forum presence. Apply the spam test ruthlessly.
- Measure honestly. Ask the AI tools directly what they know about your business and watch the answer improve over months. Track referral traffic from AI platforms. And ask every enquiry the oldest question in marketing: “How did you hear about us?”
None of this requires me. It requires discipline, customer conversations, and consistent publishing.
Where I come in, if you get stuck
Everything above is strategy, not tactics. The order matters, and the thinking behind each layer matters, but exactly how you execute it in your industry, on your budget, with your team, is something only you can work out. A dental practice and a SaaS company won’t publish the same content, run the same outreach, or chase the same third-party voices. The tactics were never going to be identical. The principles are.
Some businesses read a guide like this, take the principles, and go find their own tactics through experimentation. Brilliant. That’s the intent.
Others get stuck before they even start, not because they lack discipline, but because the capacity or the skill isn’t there yet. The customer conversations don’t happen, or they happen, and nobody knows how to turn what was said into a promise, a page, or a content plan. Trying to execute without that foundation is exactly what burns cash and energy: money spent on tactics that were never going to work, time spent chasing signals nobody actually gave.
That’s the work I do: the strategy sessions that map who your customers really are, what makes them search, and what they need to see before they trust you, followed by the SEO and AEO work built on top of it.
If the strategy tells me you don’t have an SEO problem, I’ll say so.
Either way, start with one customer conversation this month. Then publish the answer to the question they actually asked. That’s one dot the machines couldn’t connect yesterday.
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