A growing share of your customers no longer scroll through search results. They ask a question and read an answer. Sometimes that answer is Google’s AI Overview at the top of the results page. Sometimes it is ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity, asked directly: “What’s a good bakery near Forsyth Park?” or “Who should I call for a roof leak in Pooler?”
If your business is named in that answer, you get the customer. If it is not, you may never know the search happened.
What the clicks look like now
The clearest independent data on this comes from Pew Research Center, which studied the browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. When Google showed an AI summary, users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, compared with 15% when no summary appeared. They clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in about 1% of visits. Google disputed the study’s methodology, and the data is from early 2025. The direction is still hard to argue with: when the answer appears on the page, fewer people click through to find it.
For a local business, that means the summary is the new storefront window. Being one of the sources the AI draws on matters more than being the fourth blue link below it.
How Maai® handles this. Every site we build serves its full text to crawlers on the first request, ships with structured data, and publishes articles that answer the questions customers actually ask. For a Savannah bakery we work with, search impressions rose 30% within two weeks of launch, largely on the strength of those articles.
There is no secret AI ranking
Two acronyms get sold here. AEO, answer engine optimization, means structuring your pages so they get quoted in AI summaries and featured answers. GEO, generative engine optimization, means making your business legible to AI assistants that write recommendations. Both are real ideas. Neither is a new trick.
Google’s own guidance for its AI features says there are no additional requirements to appear in them beyond standard search best practices. The assistants outside Google work from what they can find and read about you on the open web. So the work is the same work that makes a business findable in ordinary search, done carefully, with a few additions that matter more now than they used to.
What AI systems read about you
When an AI assistant recommends a local business, it is assembling an answer from sources it trusts. For local businesses, those sources are mostly:
- Your Google Business Profile. Categories, hours, services, and the content of your reviews. Reviews matter twice here: as a signal of quality, and as text that describes what you do in customers’ own words.
- Your website. Specifically, pages that state facts plainly. What you do, where, for whom, at what price, and how it works.
- Other sites that mention you. Local news, the Chamber directory, industry directories, review platforms.
- Consistency across all of them. When your name, address, and phone number match everywhere, the system is more confident it has the right business.
What to do about it
State the facts in plain text. An AI system cannot quote what it cannot read. “Family-owned since 1987, two locations in Savannah, same-day service on shirts dropped by 9 a.m.” is quotable. A hero image with a slogan baked into it is not.
Answer the questions customers actually ask. Every business has the same ten questions on repeat: price ranges, how long something takes, whether you serve a certain area, what to bring. Put each answer on your site, in a sentence a stranger could quote without context.
Make every service and location its own page. An assistant asked about wedding dress cleaning looks for a page about wedding dress cleaning. A list of eight services on one page is a weaker source than eight pages.
Make sure the AI crawlers can read your site. Two things block them. The first is a robots.txt file that disallows the crawlers AI companies use, which some hosting setups do by default. The second is a site that builds its content in the visitor’s browser with JavaScript. Vercel analyzed AI crawler traffic across its network in December 2024 and found that the major AI crawlers it measured did not execute JavaScript. If your site’s text only appears after scripts run, those crawlers see an empty page.
Add structured data. Schema markup tells machines your business type, address, hours, services, and prices in a format they do not have to interpret. It is invisible to customers and costs nothing once it is in place.
Keep earning reviews and mentions. Every new review adds a sentence describing your business in a customer’s own words. Every local mention adds a source confirming you exist.
How to check where you stand
Ask the assistants yourself. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, and ask the question your customers ask: “Best dry cleaner in Savannah,” “emergency vet near Richmond Hill,” “who does wedding websites in Savannah.” Note who gets named, and what the answer says about them. Then look at what those businesses have that you do not. It is usually a more complete Google profile, more recent reviews, and a website that states plainly what they do.
Repeat the same questions every month. The answers change, and the changes tell you whether the work is landing.
How we build for it
Every site we build renders its content on the server, so any crawler, AI or otherwise, receives the full text on the first request. Every site ships with structured data, a page for each service and location, and a robots.txt that allows the major AI crawlers unless the owner asks otherwise. Every week, MOCO publishes content that answers the questions your customers ask, and keeps your Google profile current.
That work is part of the $500 a month plan.
Want to see how your business looks from the outside? Request a free site audit: a short video walkthrough of your website the way a stranger experiences it, with what I would fix first. If you would rather talk now, book a call.