How Do You Get a Small Business Cited by ChatGPT Instead of Just Ranked by Google?

AEO and GEO — answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization — are the practice of making a business the thing ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or a Google AI Overview cites when someone asks a real question, not just another link in a Google search result. I ran the audit on widergood.com itself before recommending it to anyone, the same rule that applies to everything else here.

The first pass scored 8 out of 20. Four test queries, phrased the way an actual prospect would ask them and never using the business name, returned zero citations. The businesses that did show up became the real competitor set — not whoever ranks well in ordinary search, which turned out to be a different list entirely.

Most of what raised the score afterward was mechanical, not creative. robots.txt already allowed the nine named AI crawlers — a lot of sites block them by accident with an old blanket rule and never notice. ProfessionalService, Person, and FAQPage schema went in and passed Google's Rich Results Test, so an AI engine reading the page gets structured facts instead of guessing from paragraphs.

The FAQ content mattered more than any of it. Eighteen questions, phrased the way people actually ask them, each answered directly in the first sentence — that's the block an AI engine quotes back almost verbatim when someone asks the underlying question later. Page titles got the same treatment: what the business does and who it's for, not just a name.

None of this replaced good positioning. It made positioning that already existed legible to a machine instead of only to a person scrolling the page.