AEO for small business: how to get cited by ChatGPT and AI search
To appear in AI search, a small business needs its site to be readable, allowed, and quotable by the 4 assistants that answer buyer questions today: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. OpenAEO scores that in seconds against 5 retrieval gates and 8 headline checks, free on 1 site. Most owners never find out they are missing, because the failure is invisible, the site looks fine to a human and returns nothing useful to a crawler. OpenAEO is the free answer-engine-optimization tool built for exactly this situation. It scores your one site against 5 retrieval gates and 8 headline checks in seconds, tells you which assistants can and cannot see you, and hands you the two files and the rewritten paragraph that get you named, and your dashboard tracks how those results move over time. Here is the five-step playbook it runs, written so you can follow it by hand, with the specific thing OpenAEO does for you at each step.
1. Clear the retrieval gates
Before any copywriting matters, an assistant has to be able to fetch your page. Serve your content in raw HTML (not JavaScript-only), allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot in robots.txt, and confirm your CDN returns HTTP 200 to those bots instead of a challenge. If that sentence meant nothing to you, we took the same measurement on a site you have heard of and explained every request in plain words. OpenAEO tests all of this live, per bot, from the edge, the single most common reason a good small-business site is invisible.
2. Write the answer layer
Assistants quote specifics. Open each key page by answering the buyer's question in the first 100 words, with your business name, city, category, and at least one verifiable number: "$24, 300+ sold, 4.8 from 112 reviews," never "premium, best-in-class." Adjectives don't get cited; numbers do.
3. Add schema that matches what's visible
Add Organization, Product or Offer, and FAQPage structured data, and make sure every rating, count, and price in the schema also appears in the visible text. Schema that doesn't mirror the page is the most common failure OpenAEO sees, and assistants discount it.
4. Build off-site consensus
Assistants trust agreement between independent sources more than anything you say about yourself. Earn genuine mentions in relevant community threads and get into at least two third-party "best [category] in [city]" roundups. Keep your name, address, and phone identical everywhere.
5. Measure citations, not just the score
Segment AI-referral traffic from chatgpt.com, claude.ai and perplexity.ai, and test your target questions weekly across the four assistants. OpenAEO captures a same-day citation baseline so you can prove whether the work turned into customers, a score you can optimize is not the same as being found.
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