Your Business Is Invisible to AI.

AEO is the discipline of optimizing your business’s presence for AI-powered recommendation engines, including Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on keyword rankings, AEO builds entity-level authority, structured data, and content clarity so AI systems can confidently reference and recommend your business.

SEO optimizes for search engine rankings using keywords, backlinks, and technical factors. AEO optimizes for AI answer engines that select, summarize, and recommend businesses based on entity authority, content structure, and trust signals. A business can rank well in traditional search and still be invisible to AI tools if its content is not structured for extraction and citation.

AI tools do not evaluate websites the way traditional search engines do. They rely on structured data, entity signals, citation authority, and content clarity. Most businesses lack proper schema markup, have inconsistent business information across platforms, and structure content for human readers rather than AI extractability. All of it is fixable.

We track featured snippets, AI Overview citations, branded search lift, entity recognition across platforms, and AI Share of Voice, which measures the percentage of relevant AI-generated answers that reference your business. Reports arrive monthly covering Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.

A prompt-gap analysis identifies which questions AI platforms are answering about your industry and where your business is absent from those answers. We find the specific prompts where competitors are cited and you are not, then build targeted content and entity signals to close those gaps.

Two ways. As a custom package priced by deliverable, scoped to exactly the schema, entity, and content work your business needs. Or inside a TMC Marketing system: the Growth System includes schema, entity optimization, and quarterly AI visibility audits, and the Command System runs the full AEO program with monthly reporting.

Yes, as one program. The same technical, local and content work that ranks on Google is structured so ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity can read and cite it: schema markup, entity and citation building, answer-first content, an llms.txt file and monthly AI citation checks. In the months before Google’s 2026 AI search updates we prepared our clients’ sites this way, and when the updates landed those clients started appearing in AI citations for their categories.

Yes. Our AEO work is built for local businesses: consistent name, address and phone data everywhere AI looks, LocalBusiness and Service schema, Google Business Profile optimization, and content that answers the questions local customers actually ask assistants. We track whether the assistants mention the business for those questions month by month.

Ask to see AI citations it has earned and how it earned them, in plain language. TMC Marketing publishes what its AEO work consists of, measures citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity monthly, and applies the same work to its own site.

Yes. That is the core of our AEO work. Schema markup (Organization, Service, FAQ, LocalBusiness, BreadcrumbList) states who you are and what you offer in a form machines read directly. Answer-first sections put a direct answer near the top of each page. Consistent name, address, and phone details across directories mean assistants are not choosing between conflicting sources, and an llms.txt file points AI crawlers at your most important pages. Every month we check what ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity actually say about you, and fix the gaps they show.

A core service. AEO is its own program at TMC Marketing: schema, entity and citation building, answer-first content, and monthly AI citation reporting across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. It is part of The TMC Marketing Department, included in the Growth and Command systems or sold as a custom package on its own, and we run the same program on our own site.

Yes. We optimize for the assistants your customers now ask, including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. The work runs alongside SEO rather than replacing it, because assistants lean on the same technical, local, and content signals. When Google’s May 2026 AI search update hit, Substation Solutions, whose site we had prepared for it, went from 10 AI citations across 9 pages in April to 27 citations across 20 pages in May.

Yes. A prompt-gap analysis shows which questions customers and AI assistants ask about your category and where you are absent. We then write direct, answer-first responses on the pages where they belong, with FAQ schema so search engines and assistants can lift them cleanly. This page is built the same way.