AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is the work of making sure AI assistants can find your business, understand what it does, and trust it enough to recommend it by name. It matters because a growing share of “who should I call” questions now go straight to ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot, and never reach a page of blue links. If those tools can’t verify you exist, they name someone else.
The lead you never knew you lost
A pipe bursts on a Sunday afternoon. The homeowner doesn’t open a search engine and scroll. They ask their phone, in plain words, who can come out today. Back comes a short answer naming two or three businesses, with a tap-to-call button beside each.
If you’re not one of those names, nothing happens. No impression, no click, nothing in your analytics. Old-style search at least told you that you were sitting on page two. An AI answer just recommends someone else, and the first you hear about it is a slow month.
This is no longer a niche habit. Roy Morgan’s March 2026 quarter research puts 13.6 million Australians aged 14 and over, 58% of the population, on an AI tool in an average four weeks, with 10.5 million of them using ChatGPT. Telsyte’s 2026 study, reported by B&T in June, found 12% of Australians now call AI their main way of finding information online, up from 5% a year earlier, and half of those who see an AI summary in search say they often rely on it without clicking through.
In this guide:
- What changed in 2026, and why the timing matters for Australian businesses
- Why AI assistants build a different picture of your business than Google does
- What AEO means, in plain English
- Where an AI answer’s recommendation comes from (it’s mostly not your website)
- Four things a local business can fix this month
- How to check where you stand right now, free
What changed in 2026
Three things moved this year, and they’re why this post has been updated.
Google Search went AI-first. AI Mode launched in Australia in October 2025, and at Google I/O in May 2026 the company said it had passed one billion monthly users worldwide, with queries more than doubling every quarter. The same event previewed Search agents that book local services and even phone businesses on a customer’s behalf. Those are US-only for now, with no Australian date, but they show where Google is heading: the assistant doesn’t just name a business, it contacts one.
Google also started showing site owners their AI visibility. Since June 2026, Search Console has been rolling out generative AI performance reports that separate impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode. It’s still limited to a subset of sites, but if you have it, it’s the first official measure of whether Google’s AI is showing you at all.
And the assistants got more local. ChatGPT now uses your approximate location for “near me” questions and shares it with partner search providers to pull business listings. Apple’s rebuilt Siri AI arrives in beta with iOS 27 later this year for English-language devices, which puts a conversational assistant on most Australian iPhones. OpenAI has also begun testing ads inside ChatGPT, including in Australia. More on that in the FAQ, because the short answer is that you still can’t buy the recommendation.
Why AI assistants build a different picture of your business
A search engine crawls pages, ranks them, and hands the customer a list. The judgement is theirs. An answer engine assembles one answer from many sources, then decides which businesses it’s willing to put its name to.
Those sources are broader than your website. Your Google Business Profile, Apple and Bing listings, review platforms, industry registers, directories, social profiles, and any page on the web that mentions you all feed the same picture. The model is asking a simple question: do I know enough about this business to recommend it without getting it wrong?
That’s where an outdated footprint costs you. An old address on a directory nobody has logged into since 2019. A phone number that changed when you switched providers. A homepage that describes you in slogans instead of saying what you do and where. A person would shrug and ring you anyway. A model treats the contradiction as risk, and risk means it reaches for a business it can verify instead. There’s a closer look at how answer engines choose which business to recommend if you want the mechanics.
The numbers on how selective this is are stark. SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index, which tracked more than 350,000 business locations across 2,751 mostly US brands, found ChatGPT recommended just 1.2% of those locations, Perplexity 7.4% and Gemini 11%. The same brands appeared in Google’s local three-pack 35.9% of the time. There is no page two in an AI answer. You’re named, or you’re absent.
So what is AEO?
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is the practice of getting your business surfaced and cited inside AI-generated answers, rather than only ranked in a list of links. You’ll also hear it called AI SEO or GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation); in practice the terms are used interchangeably. Our complete AI search guide is the long version, and the glossary covers the jargon.
For a local service business, this isn’t a second marketing program bolted onto the first. AEO runs on the same foundations as good local SEO: a complete and accurate profile, real reviews, consistent business details, and content that answers plain questions in plain words. You’re extending what already works. There’s more on how the two fit together in AEO vs SEO.
Where the recommendation comes from
Here’s the part most advice skips. A local AI answer has two halves, built from different sources.
The first half is the sentence that names you. When listings-software company Pluspoint pulled apart 210 ChatGPT answers to local dining questions in August 2026, nearly half the cited pages were city and national editorial, another one in ten were forum threads, and not one answer read a Google, Bing, Apple or Yelp listing page to decide its picks. Across the wider web, only about 4% of AI citations point at a business’s own site. Roundups, directories, local press and community threads decide whether you get named. Your own pages mostly decide whether the model can tell what you are.
The second half is the card beside the sentence: address, hours, phone, booking link. That comes from licensed listing data. For Gemini and Google’s AI Mode it’s grounded in Google Maps, which is why SOCi measured Gemini’s business details as 100% accurate against 68% for ChatGPT and Perplexity, and why Gemini names local businesses at nearly ten times ChatGPT’s rate. For ChatGPT the card data comes via partners, and your Google Business Profile is still the record most of them copy from.
One caveat: both studies are American and one is restaurant-heavy. The mechanism transfers to a Brisbane physio or a Sydney electrician; the exact percentages may not. Treat them as a direction, not a forecast.
Four things to fix this month
1. Make the record agree with itself
Start with your Google Business Profile, because most of the local picture is anchored to it and Gemini reads it directly. Then work outward: Apple Business Connect (which feeds Apple Maps and Siri), Bing Places (which feeds Copilot and Windows search), the broad Australian directories like Yellow Pages, True Local and Localsearch, and whatever is specific to your trade, whether that’s hipages or Ahpra and the health directories.
The rule is simple and absolute: identical business name, address, phone, hours and category in every one of them. Not “close enough”. One stale listing with an old suburb on it is enough to make a model hedge. Our profile optimisation checklist walks through the Google side.
2. Let the machines read your site
Two checks, both under an hour. First, make sure AI crawlers can fetch your pages. OpenAI’s own documentation says a site is only eligible for ChatGPT search results if it allows OAI-SearchBot; Perplexity and Google have their own crawlers. A firewall rule, aggressive bot protection or content that only renders in the browser leaves an assistant with a blank page. Ask your web developer to confirm the site returns readable HTML to a plain request.
Second, add structured data. The LocalBusiness markup states your name, address, phone, hours, service area and services in a format software reads directly instead of inferring. Google publishes implementation guidance, and most website platforms can add it without a rebuild. Then make the words themselves answerable: lead each key page with a direct sentence that says what you do and where, use question-style headings, and add a short FAQ. Markup on a vague page gives you a well-labelled vague page. More in structured content for AI search.
3. Get named on pages you don’t own
Answer engines repeat what the web already says about a business. If the only place that describes you clearly is your own homepage, there isn’t much to repeat.
Write one plain sentence that names what you do, who for, and the suburbs or region you cover. Use that exact sentence on your homepage, your profile descriptions, your social bios and your directory entries, so scattered mentions resolve into one business. Then go and get it onto pages a model reads: the local “best plumbers in Parramatta” roundups, your industry association’s member directory, a supplier’s case study, a mention in the local paper, a helpful reply in the community Facebook group or subreddit where your customers already ask for recommendations. A useful trick from Pluspoint’s research: ask ChatGPT the customer’s question, then ask it to list the sources it used. That’s your outreach list.
4. Ask for reviews that describe the job
Reviews do the naming job better than any copy you write, because customers mention the service and the suburb in their own words. Models quote sentences; a star average gives them nothing to quote. SOCi found locations ChatGPT recommends average 4.3 stars, and that businesses sitting around 3.4 stars with almost no owner responses are effectively excluded rather than ranked lower. So respond to every review, and ask for detail rather than a score: what was fixed, which suburb, how quickly.
Keep the asking straight. Under the ACCC’s rules on online reviews, you ask every customer the same way, and you never incentivise or script what they say.
How to check where you stand right now
You don’t have to guess which of these gaps is yours. Run the free local visibility check below. It looks up what Google returns for your business, shows the nearby businesses you’re compared against, and reads the signals AI tools lean on when they decide who to name. It takes about 15 seconds, and the report separates what Google returned from what your website suggests, so you know whether to fix your profile, your listings or your site first.