No one can place a business in AI answers directly. Assistants pull from pages they can read and trust, so the job is to publish clear, consistent, quotable facts about your business and keep them identical everywhere your business appears. The steps below are the whole playbook.
1. Make your site readable without JavaScript
If your content only appears after scripts run, many crawlers never see it. Your hours, services and prices should exist in the page's HTML. Allow search and AI crawlers in robots.txt instead of blocking them.
2. Match your name, address, phone and hours everywhere
Your site, Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Yelp and Facebook should say exactly the same thing. Assistants cross-check sources, and conflicting facts make them skip you or repeat the wrong ones.
3. Put hours, services, menu and prices in real text
Text in images and PDFs is invisible to most answer engines. If a customer can ask about it, it should be written on the page as ordinary text with a price or a time next to it.
4. Add LocalBusiness schema with the right subtype
Structured data tells machines what your business is, not just what it says. Use the most specific subtype that fits, such as Restaurant, BeautySalon or HomeAndConstructionBusiness, and connect it to your pages.
5. Answer your top 10 customer questions on the site
Write the questions the way customers ask them, then answer each one in the first sentence beneath it. Answer-first pages give assistants a sentence they can quote and a business to attach it to.
6. Publish a comparison of you and the usual alternatives
A fair comparison table is one of the formats assistants quote most. State what you cost, what is included and when another option is the better choice, and keep the facts checkable.
7. Earn mentions beyond your own site
Reviews, local press, your chamber of commerce and local lists all teach assistants that your business exists and matters. A claim on your own page is a start; the same fact confirmed elsewhere is what gets repeated.
8. Ask the assistants what they say about you every month
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your customers ask and log the answers. When a fact is wrong, trace it to the source that taught it, fix that source, and check again in 30 days.
This is the work our Shine plan includes as core AEO, done for you every month. Halo AEO+ runs step 8 every week and sends you the Halo Report, so wrong facts get found and fixed before they cost you a customer.