What Is AEO, and What Are Successful Long Island Businesses Doing About It?
A restaurant owner in Bayville got a call last month from a regular customer asking why the place “wasn’t showing up” when she asked ChatGPT for a good spot for Sunday brunch. The restaurant has a strong Google listing, a four and a half star rating, and ranks fine on Google search. It just wasn’t the place ChatGPT decided to mention.
That’s the new version of an old problem. For fifteen years, “getting found” meant ranking on Google. Now a growing share of the people looking for a plumber, a dentist, or a Sunday brunch spot on Long Island are asking an AI assistant instead of typing into a search bar, and AI assistants don’t build their answers the same way Google’s blue links do.
That’s what AEO, answer engine optimization, is about: making sure your business is one of the ones an AI tool actually names when someone asks it a question.
AEO isn’t a replacement for SEO.
It’s what SEO turned into.
SEO was built around rankings and clicks. You optimized a page so it would show up high in search results, and people clicked through to your site to get the answer.
AI answer engines, ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, skip that step. They read across the web, decide what the accurate answer is, and hand it to the person directly, often without a click at all. Ranking in the top traditional search spots isn’t even a requirement for getting cited in an AI answer. A business can rank on page one and still get left out of the AI’s answer, or rank on page two and still get named, depending on how clearly the AI can verify who they are and what they do.
The businesses treating this as a separate project are already behind. The ones getting cited are the ones that folded it into how they already do SEO and local marketing, because the two run on a lot of the same underlying signals.
What actually gets a business named in an AI answer
A few things consistently show up in how these tools decide who to mention:
Clear, direct answers on the page itself. AI tools tend to quote the first plain-language sentence that answers a question, not the paragraph of backstory before it. A page that opens with “We install and repair boilers across Nassau and Suffolk County” gets quoted more easily than one that opens with a story about the company’s founding.
Consistent information everywhere. Name, address, phone number, and hours need to match exactly across your website, Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, and every directory you’re listed in. AI tools cross-reference these listings to decide whether a business is real and current. Inconsistent information reads as unreliable, even when the business itself is completely legitimate.
A complete, accurate Google Business Profile. This has always mattered for local search. It matters just as much for AI answers, because it’s one of the clearest, most structured sources of truth an AI system has about a local business.
Real reviews, recent and specific. AI tools treat reviews as evidence, not just a star rating. Volume, how recent they are, and whether the business replies all factor in. A business with forty reviews from the last year, written in customers’ own words, reads as more trustworthy to an AI system than one with four hundred reviews that all trailed off two years ago.
Structured markup that labels the page for machines. Schema markup, the LocalBusiness and FAQ tags added to a site’s code, tells an AI system “this is a business, here’s its category, here’s the question this section answers” instead of leaving it to guess from loose paragraphs.
What this looks like for a Long Island business, in practice
None of this requires throwing out a marketing plan and starting over. It requires treating “would an AI tool quote this?” as a normal question to ask about a page, the same way “does this rank?” already gets asked.
A home services company on Long Island doing this well has service pages that open with a direct answer to the question a homeowner is actually typing (or asking Siri), a Google Business Profile with every field filled in and categories that match what they actually do, and a habit of asking every satisfied customer for a review instead of only the ones they know will say something glowing.
A restaurant doing this well keeps its hours, menu, and location identical across its website, Google listing, and every review site, and treats a slow month of reviews as worth fixing, not just a slow month of foot traffic.
The businesses that show up when someone asks an AI assistant “who’s a good electrician near me” or “where should I get dinner in Huntington tonight” aren’t necessarily the biggest ones. They’re the ones that made themselves easy for a machine to verify and quote.
Most of the fixes that improve AEO, a complete Google Business Profile, a steady flow of reviews, clear and consistent business information, are the same fundamentals covered in local SEO. Getting that foundation right is also part of the broader marketing strategy and positioning work that determines whether an AI tool, or a human, understands what a business does and who it is for.
Where to start
Pick five questions your own customers actually ask, the exact way they’d ask them, and run them through ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview yourself. See who gets named. If it’s not you, that’s not a reason to panic, it’s a short list of what to fix first: the Google Business Profile, the review flow, or how directly your pages answer the questions people are already asking.
If you want a second set of eyes on where your business stands and what to fix first, that’s exactly what a Growth Plan is for.
