What Is AEO? How to Get ChatGPT to Recommend Your Business by Name

Short answer first, so you don't have to dig for it: AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of making your business readable, trustworthy and quotable to AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot — so they name your business when a customer asks a buying question. SEO competes for a position in a list of links. AEO competes to be the name the AI actually says out loud.

You'll also hear it called GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), AI Search Optimization, or plainly "SEO for ChatGPT." Same thing.

This post explains what it is, how to check where your shop stands today, and what to do next. No jargon — promise.

What's actually changing out there

The way customers look for you has changed.

Before: someone typed "nail salon near me" into Google, looked at ten blue links, clicked a few, compared, then called.

Now: they open ChatGPT and type "find me a good nail salon in Vaughan." The AI replies in a paragraph and names two or three shops. They call one of them. Done. There is no results page to scroll.

Here's the painful part: if the answer engine has never read your business, you are not ranked low — you simply don't exist in that conversation. There's no position 11 to climb from. There is only "named" and "not named."

And this is what most owners get wrong: traditional SEO does not automatically fix this. You can sit at #1 on Google Maps and ChatGPT still won't know who you are. Two different systems.

How is AEO different from SEO?

A quick table:

Important: AEO does not replace SEO. It is the layer on top.

Think of it this way. Google Maps SEO wins the "near me" moments — someone driving, hungry, needing a shop right now. AEO wins the conversations happening inside ChatGPT and Gemini — someone at home, asking carefully, comparing before they decide.

Both run on the same foundations: a cleanly structured website, consistent business information everywhere, and real reviews. Improve one and the other benefits. That's why Wizy clients usually run AEO alongside Google Maps SEO rather than choosing between them.

How do I find out what ChatGPT says about my shop?

You can do this yourself, free, in about ten minutes. Do it right now:

Step 1. Open ChatGPT (and Gemini, and Perplexity — all three is better).

Step 2. Ask the way a real customer would. Don't search your own business name — search the way someone looking for you would:

"Recommend a few good nail salons in Mississauga"

"What's a good Vietnamese restaurant in Vaughan?"

"I need a reliable spa in Scarborough"

Step 3. Note which businesses get named.

Step 4. Ask again in Vietnamese, the way your actual community asks — for example "tìm tiệm nail người Việt ở Toronto." The results are usually completely different from the English ones, and almost nobody checks this.

Step 5. If the AI names your competitors but not you, click the sources it cites. Those are the sources the AI trusts. To get named, you need to exist on them.

After those five steps you know exactly where you stand. Most owners are a little shaken the first time — not because they rank behind someone, but because they don't appear at all.

What does doing AEO actually involve?

Here is the real work, in plain language:

1. An audit first. See how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity currently answer questions about you and your competitors. You can't fix what you haven't measured.

2. Rewriting content answer-first. Every important page must answer the real question in its first two or three sentences. AI skims and lifts the opening; if your page starts with "we are proud to be a leading provider of..." there is nothing worth quoting.

3. Structured data (schema). Sounds technical, but it's simple: it's labelling everything in your shop. Instead of letting the AI guess "this line of text is probably a price?", you label it clearly — this is the price, these are the hours, this is the service. Labelled data doesn't get misread.

4. Consistent information everywhere. Your name, address, phone number and hours must match exactly across Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Yelp, Apple Business Connect and Vietnamese community directories. One mismatched phone number is enough to reduce trust — the same way you'd doubt someone who gave you two different addresses.

5. Letting the AI in. Your website has a small file called robots.txt that decides who may read it. Plenty of sites accidentally block the exact AI crawlers that matter (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended). Block them and the AI will never know you. Add an llms.txt too — think of it as a business card written specifically for AI to read.

6. Tracking a monthly question set, in both languages. Each month, ask the same buying questions again and record whether you got named. No measurement, no idea whether you're gaining or slipping.

7. Citation building. Getting your business mentioned on the sources answer engines actually trust. This is the heaviest part of the work, and the most decisive.

8. Monthly reporting. Question coverage, how often the AI named you, which sources cite you, and most importantly — how many customers arrived from AI search.

One technical trick worth knowing

Slightly technical, but it saves weeks of waiting.

ChatGPT Search and Microsoft Copilot both draw on Bing's index. So for ChatGPT to know about your new page, Bing has to know first.

Normally, waiting for Bing to discover it takes weeks. There's a protocol called IndexNow that tells Bing directly "I have a new page," and Bing picks it up in hours instead of weeks.

One caveat: Google does not use IndexNow. New pages still need to be submitted manually in Google Search Console. If someone tells you a single button handles both, they're wrong.

Is this real, or just theory?

Fair question. Let me answer with Wizy's own situation.

Wizy didn't learn AEO from a course and resell it. We did it for ourselves first.

First: when a Vietnamese business owner asks ChatGPT for a Vietnamese marketing agency serving the Toronto area, ChatGPT puts Wizy Marketing Agency at the top, links wizy.ca, and lists our services correctly. A growing share of our Canadian clients tell us plainly that this is how they found us.

Second, and I like this one more: a client website Wizy built is being cited by ChatGPT as a source. When someone asks about a Vietnamese product showcase event in the GTA in 2026, ChatGPT answers from the Viet Expo site we built — pulling the correct dates, venue, booth pricing and booth dimensions from the page, and showing that website as its citation.

Being named is good. Being used as the source is considerably better.

Screenshots of both are published openly on our AEO service page. Go have a look.

How long does it take, and what does it cost?

Straight answers, no hedging.

Timeline: 60–90 days before a business starts being named. Answer engines need a crawl-and-trust cycle before they'll quote a new source. If someone promises "on ChatGPT in two weeks," be careful.

Wizy's AEO pricing (CAD per month, excluding HST, month-to-month):

And here's the commitment: on the Foundation tier, if your business isn't named by at least one major answer engine within 90 days, the next month is free. We're willing to commit to that because we did it for ourselves first.

The biggest open gap: nobody is doing Vietnamese

This is the part I most want you to notice.

Most Ontario agencies track English questions only. But your customers — our community — ask in Vietnamese: "tìm tiệm nail người Việt ở Toronto", "quán phở ngon khu Mississauga."

What the AI returns for a Vietnamese question is completely different from the English one. And almost nobody is measuring it.

Wizy is the only AEO agency in Ontario running a bilingual question set — Vietnamese measured and optimized alongside English, every month. The Vietnamese market is wide open, which means whoever gets there first takes the spot.

What should you do next?

Three steps:

Step 1 — Check yourself today. Open ChatGPT, ask the three questions above, in English and in Vietnamese. Screenshot the answers. That's your baseline.

Step 2 — Fix the free things first. Go into Google Business Profile and verify your name, address, phone and hours. Make sure they match exactly on Yelp and Facebook. That alone improves how much the AI trusts you, and costs nothing.

Step 3 — If you want it done properly. We offer a free 15-minute consultation with no obligation. Or read the full AEO service page with the proof screenshots first.

One more thing: if you want to go deeper on using Reddit to get into AI answers, I wrote a separate post on it — Reddit for AEO. Reddit is one of the sources ChatGPT trusts most.

Last thought, honestly: this isn't a passing trend. The way customers look for businesses has changed, and it isn't going back. The owners who prepare early are the ones whose names are already sitting in the answer when someone opens ChatGPT and asks.

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✍️ About the author: Do Ngoc Hoan Founder of Wizy.ca, a marketing agency for Vietnamese businesses in Ontario. I write to make marketing simple for busy shop owners — no confusing jargon. More at dongochoan.com.