When they ask AI, will you show up?

AEO is the work you do so AI tools cite you when a customer asks. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overview, Claude, Apple Intelligence, Bing Copilot. SEO chases the ten blue links; AEO targets being the cited answer. Same technical hygiene (schema, page speed, clean URLs), different finish line. SEO builds discoverability. AEO builds something the AI can quote.

How people search has changed. Instead of typing “plumber near me” and scanning ten results, customers ask a chat assistant the whole question: “Who’s the best emergency plumber in south St. Louis that opens early?” They get one sentence back. One or two names. Sometimes a link. If you’re not in the answer, the rest of your marketing doesn’t get to work.

45% of local consumers ask AI for business recommendations. A year ago that number was 6%. The Yellow Pages-to-Google migration didn’t move this fast. Most St. Louis local businesses are still invisible to it: blocked robots.txt, no schema, unclaimed listings. Your competitors get cited when AI looks up plumbers, accountants, realtors; you don’t. The customers are real and the gap is widening every quarter.

Three pillars guide every call: Technical (can AI find you?), Authority (can AI trust you?), Content (do you answer what they ask?). We audit all three, write you a prioritized fix list, and help you act on it. Read what makes us different.

Pick the tier that fits your bandwidth. Audit if you want to learn it and run it yourself. Setup & Hand-off if you want it built right then handed over. Done-For-You if you want it managed end-to-end. Every engagement starts the same way: a written audit you keep, whether you stay with us or not. The audit names the specific problems on your site, ranks them by impact, shows the verifiable evidence. No proposals dressed up as reports.

This works for service businesses with tight geography. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC, dental, legal, accounting, home repair, real estate, local retail. The sharper your service area, the better AEO performs: answer engines weigh local intent heavily and the competitive field shrinks. If you’re a SaaS trying to rank nationally on Google, classical SEO and paid ads own your ROI. If you’re a local business around St. Louis, AEO is the lever almost nobody is pulling yet.

We cap year one at 5 clients. Local work needs attention; if you need us to add you to a roster of 100, we’re not the fit. We prefer owner-operators and small teams. We won’t work with multi-location chains, lead-generation farms, or any business whose model depends on hiding the real price. Honest businesses are the only kind that benefit from being more findable.

Four technical foundations get wired on day one. Schema markup tags your business, hours, address, reviews, and FAQs in the format AI engines read natively. robots.txt explicitly allows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot to crawl your site (most local businesses block them by accident). Verified sitemap lists every page so indexing is complete. llms.txt points AI tools at your licensing, privacy policies, and anything off-limits. These four files take an afternoon. Most local sites have zero of them. That’s the gap.

After the four files, we configure your Google Business Profile, claim and align your Apple Business Connect listing, and fix NAP (name, address, phone) consistency across the directories AI engines actually read. Review schema gets added so star ratings travel into AI answers. Every change lands in a plain-language report so you can see what was done and why. No black-box reporting.