AI Visibility
45% of consumers now use AI tools to find local businesses. A year ago it was 6%. Google's share of local discovery dropped from 83% to 71% in that same year. The question is no longer only where you rank. It is whether you get mentioned at all. Source: BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2026
Straight Answers
This category is full of people selling tricks. Here is what the evidence supports, including the parts that argue against hiring anyone for it.
Google's own guidance says optimizing for its generative AI features is still SEO, because those features run on the same ranking and quality systems as regular search. Crawlability, fast pages, real content, clean structure. If those are broken, no amount of AI-specific work saves you.
Source: Google Search Central, AI optimization guideA search engine ranks pages. An AI system answers questions about things. If your business is described three different ways across your site, your Google Business Profile, and your directory listings, a language model has no reliable idea what you are or where you work. Making a business unambiguous to a machine is real work, and most sites have never had it done.
There is no position 3 in a ChatGPT answer. You are either referenced or you are not. That means the question changes from 'where do we rank' to 'which questions do we get named in, and what does the model say about us.' Tracking that requires actually asking the systems, repeatedly.
Google publicly states you do not need an llms.txt file, content chunking, or writing specially for AI. We publish an llms.txt because it is nearly free and the non-Google systems fetch pages live, but we will not tell you it moves Google. Anyone promising an AI ranking trick is selling something.
Source: Google Search Central, AI optimization guideProof
You can inspect every piece of this right now. No case study required, no screenshots to take on faith. It is live on the domain you are reading.
The Work
One canonical business entity with stable identifiers, consistent name/address/phone everywhere, founder and organization linked, service area matching your Google Business Profile exactly. This is the layer that makes you resolvable.
Your GBP is the most authoritative structured record of your business that exists. When it disagrees with your site, the site loses. We make them agree.
Real questions your customers ask, answered directly and early on the page, with the specifics that make an answer quotable: prices, timelines, what is and is not included.
llms.txt and a published entity map so a retrieval system can read what you do without parsing twenty pages of HTML. Cheap to maintain, unproven on Google, plausible everywhere else.
Language models learn about you from what other sources say. Directory accuracy, local citations, and being mentioned somewhere other than your own website.
Recurring prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and Gemini for the questions that matter to your business, tracking whether you appear and what gets said.
Questions
AI visibility is whether your business gets mentioned when someone asks an AI assistant a question you should be the answer to. You will also see it called AEO (answer engine optimization), GEO (generative engine optimization), LLMO, or AI SEO. They describe the same goal and the industry has not settled on one term. We say AI visibility because it is plain English and because Google's own guidance cautions buyers about vendors leading with the acronyms.
Partly, and that is the honest answer. Google says optimizing for its AI features is still SEO, so a well-run SEO program already covers most of it. What is usually missing is entity clarity, machine-readable structure, and any measurement of whether AI systems actually mention you. If your SEO is solid, this is an add-on. If your SEO is broken, fix that first.
More than it did a year ago. BrightLocal's 2026 survey found 45% of consumers now use AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before, while Google's share of local discovery fell from 83% to 71%. That is a real shift in one year, in exactly the category a local business competes in.
We run a fixed set of prompts, the questions your customers would actually ask, across the major assistants on a schedule, and record whether you are mentioned, how you are described, and who gets named instead. It is closer to brand tracking than to rank tracking, and it is the only way to know if any of this worked.
For SEO retainer clients it is part of the work, not a separate line item. Standalone, we do a one-time entity and AI visibility audit that covers your schema, GBP alignment, machine-readable structure, and a baseline visibility measurement. Contact us for a scope and a fixed price.
No, and neither can anyone else. There is no submission form, no ranking dial, and no paid placement. What we can do is remove the reasons a model would get you wrong or skip you: contradictory business data, thin or unanswerable content, no third-party corroboration, and no measurement.
Related
AI visibility sits on top of the fundamentals. If the foundation is not there, start with the service that builds it.
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No pitch, no pressure. If the data is interesting, we can talk about what to do with it.