Why your business isn't showing up when customers ask AI who to call
There is no second page in an AI answer. Either you are named, or you do not exist for that customer.
What an answer engine is actually doing
When someone asks an assistant "who should I call in Kempton Park for a leaking roof", the model is not running a Google search and reading the top ten links. It is assembling an answer from what it has learned and, increasingly, from live retrieval across sources it considers reliable: your Google Business Profile, review text, directory listings, your own website's structured data, and mentions of you elsewhere.
The practical consequence is that the answer is built from what is written about you in machine-readable form. Not from how good your work is, and not from how nice your website looks.
Reviews are the raw material
Review text does most of the heavy lifting, because it is specific, recent and written by third parties. A business with forty reviews that repeatedly mention "came out the same day" and "fixed a leak two other companies couldn't" gives an answer engine concrete, attributable language to work with. A business with four reviews saying "Good service" gives it nothing.
This is why review volume and recency matter more than the star rating in isolation. Recency in particular: a model summarising a business tends to weight the last few months heavily, because that is what reflects current quality.
Your site has to state the obvious things explicitly
Human visitors infer from context. Machines do not. If your site never says in plain text which suburbs you serve, which services you offer, your hours, and how to reach you, that information cannot be extracted, no matter how obvious it is from your photographs.
Structured data closes the gap. FAQ markup in particular is the highest-leverage thing a small business can add, because it presents a question and its answer in exactly the shape an answer engine wants to lift. Local business markup — name, address, phone, area served, opening hours — is the other half.
Consistency across the web is a ranking signal
If your business name, address and phone number differ between your website, your Google profile and three directories, every one of those sources becomes less trustworthy. Answer engines resolve conflicts by discounting the entity. Cleaning up inconsistent listings is unglamorous work that produces disproportionate results.
How to tell whether it's working
Ask the assistants directly, in the words a customer would use, and write down who gets named. Do it monthly. It is a crude measure, but it is the only one that reflects the thing you actually care about, and it tells you whether the gap is closing.
Most local businesses in South Africa have not started on any of this, which is the opportunity. The bar is currently low enough that consistent reviews and correct structured data are often enough to be the named answer.
Questions people actually ask
How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?
Answer engines build responses from your Google Business Profile, your review text, consistent directory listings and structured data on your own site. The most effective actions are collecting recent reviews continuously, making sure your name, address and phone number match everywhere, and adding FAQ and local business markup to your website so your services and service areas are machine-readable.
What is AEO or GEO?
Answer Engine Optimisation, sometimes called Generative Engine Optimisation, is the practice of making a business appear in the answers that AI assistants generate, rather than only in traditional search result listings. It overlaps heavily with local SEO but places far more weight on review content and structured data.
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. The underlying signals overlap substantially — reviews, listing accuracy and clear on-page content help both. AEO is better understood as an additional surface where customers now find businesses, not a replacement for search.