Ask an assistant to recommend a supplier in your city and you get a short list of names. Not ten blue links, not a page two. Three or four businesses, stated as fact. Everyone else is invisible, and nobody tells them it is happening.
Getting onto that list is not the same job as ranking. It uses some of the same foundations, but the thing the model is looking for is different, and most sites give it nothing usable. Here is what changes that.
Why models pick some businesses and not others
A model answering a recommendation question is not running a ranking algorithm. It is assembling a statement it can defend from whatever it has read. When your site gives it clear, specific, structured facts, you become easy to quote. When your site gives it marketing prose, you become a risk it avoids.
That is the whole game. Not tricks, not volume. Being the easiest business in your category to state something true about.
If a model cannot find a clean fact about your price, your service or your location, it will either skip you or invent one. Both outcomes cost you money.
Change one: build a single source of truth
Create one page that holds your services, your pricing, your hours, your service area and your policies. Not scattered across a homepage, a footer and a PDF. One page, written as statements of fact, kept current.
This page is rarely your best looking one, and it is often the most valuable. It gives every crawler a single unambiguous answer to the questions people actually ask, which removes the gap a model would otherwise fill on its own.
- Every service you offer, named the way a customer would say it, not the way your industry says it.
- Real numbers wherever you can publish them. Ranges are fine. Silence is not.
- Anything you do not do, stated plainly. It stops models attributing a competitor’s service to you.
Change two: wrap those facts in schema
Structured data is how you stop a crawler guessing from prose. FAQ and LocalBusiness schema turn the same sentences into labeled fields, which is a far more reliable input than a paragraph a parser has to interpret.
You do not need a developer for this. Native WordPress blocks and a free plugin will produce valid markup, and the work is closer to filling in a form than writing code. Our AEO work covers the mechanics, and the same fields feed the GEO work that gets you into AI Overviews.
Change three: write high density snippets
A high density snippet is a short paragraph, roughly 40 to 50 words, that answers one question with specifics and no throat clearing. Models lift these almost verbatim because there is nothing to strip out.
The second sentence can be quoted whole, by any model, to answer a real question. The first cannot be quoted at all, because it says nothing that could be checked.
Free audit
See where your business shows up in AI answers
We run ten of your buying questions through ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews and show you where you stand. A person replies within 24 hours, Monday to Friday. You keep the audit either way.
How to know whether it worked
Write down the ten questions a customer asks right before they buy. Run them through ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Count how many answers name you. That percentage is your AI share of voice, and it is the only number in this field you can verify yourself in about a minute.
Re-run the same ten questions monthly. Models refresh on their own schedule, so movement is uneven, but the direction over a quarter tells you plainly whether the structural work landed.
Where to start if you only do one thing
Build the source of truth page. Schema and snippets both get easier once the facts exist in one place, and it is the change that most reliably stops a model inventing something about your business. Everything else in this article compounds on top of it.
