Show up when customers ask AI — not just Google.
More people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for recommendations instead of searching. AI search optimization makes sure your business is the answer they get.
What's included
AI Crawler Readiness
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini each crawl the web with their own bots. I make sure yours welcomes all of them — robots.txt, llms.txt, and clean technical access.
Entity & Schema Optimization
Structured data (Schema.org) is the clearest machine-readable signal AI engines have. I mark up your business, services, FAQs, and content so AI understands exactly who you are.
Answer-First Content
AI engines quote pages that answer questions directly in the first sentences. I restructure your content into the declarative, citable format AI actually pulls from.
Bing & Index Coverage
ChatGPT's search runs on Bing's index — a step most businesses skip entirely. I get you indexed and optimized where the AI engines actually look.
Citations & Trust Signals
AI answers to "best X near me" are assembled from directories, reviews, and mentions across the web. I build the citation footprint AI engines trust.
AI Visibility Checks
Monthly checks of what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity actually say when asked about businesses like yours in Richmond — and what changed.
The honest version
Search is splitting in two. Google still matters — but a growing share of your customers now ask an AI assistant instead: "who's a good masonry contractor near Richmond?" typed into ChatGPT gets one short answer with a few named businesses. Either you're in that answer or you don't exist.
Getting into AI answers is different from ranking on Google. AI engines favor pages that state facts plainly. They reward structured data they can parse. They pull from pages that answer the question in the first two sentences. And they trust businesses backed by consistent directories and reviews across the web. The overlap between Google's top ten and what AI engines cite is now less than 20%. This is a separate discipline — not a byproduct of SEO.
The upside is real: industry data shows visitors referred by AI assistants convert at roughly 4x the rate of traditional search traffic, because the AI already vetted you before sending them. Fewer clicks, better customers.
I don’t just recommend this — I run it
The same GEO techniques I’d apply to your site already earn the content sites I run thousands of citations a month inside AI assistants like Microsoft Copilot — measured in Bing Webmaster Tools, not guessed at. And when Google’s rankings shift underneath a page, those AI citations keep coming: AI visibility is a separate channel, built on clear answers and clean structure rather than backlinks.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Open Microsoft Copilot or Perplexity, ask a real buying question in your industry — “who’s a good [trade] near Richmond?” — and watch which sites it names. That short list is the new shelf. Most Richmond businesses aren’t on it yet. That’s the opening.
The Richmond numbers, measured
Rather than quote national averages, I went and measured it. In August 2026 I drew a random sample of 2,500 active registered businesses across Richmond, Henrico, Chesterfield, and Hanover, confirmed which were real customer-facing operations, and audited their websites for the exact signals AI engines read.
No llms.txt
Nearly three in four local business websites have no llms.txt — the file that tells AI crawlers what a site is about.
No structured data
Two in five carry no Schema.org markup at all, so AI engines have nothing machine-readable to identify them by.
No business schema
Most of the rest have some markup but no LocalBusiness or Organization entity — the part that says who and where you are.
All three figures are measured against Richmond-metro businesses with a live website (n=377, 95% confidence). A third of confirmed local businesses have no website at all — and it's worst in Henrico, at 40.8%.
This is what "early-mover territory" actually looks like in numbers. Almost nobody here has done the work, which is exactly why doing it now is cheap and effective.
Source: The State of Richmond Small Business Websites 2026, RVA Digital Works. Free to cite; the full dataset is published as CSV.
The GEO/AEO work, concretely
One-time setup: AI crawler audit and robots.txt/llms.txt configuration, full Schema.org markup (business entity, services, FAQs, articles), answer-first rewrites of your key pages, Bing Webmaster Tools indexing, and a baseline report of what each major AI engine currently says about your business.
Ongoing (part of the Growth Plan): monthly AI visibility checks across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, citation building in the sources AI engines pull from, fresh Q&A content targeting the questions customers actually ask AI, and date/freshness signals kept current — AI engines discount stale pages.
Honest expectations: nobody can guarantee placement inside an AI answer — anyone who promises that is guessing. What I can do is make your business maximally readable, verifiable, and citable, which is what every documented AI recommendation has in common. This is early-mover territory: most Richmond businesses haven't started, which is exactly why it works.
Already have a website that ranks? GEO builds on top of local SEO — the two share a foundation, and I bundle them.
AI search visibility across the Richmond metro
When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for "the best [your service] near me," the answer changes by location — the AI leans on local signals, reviews, and structured data tied to a specific town. Getting named for "in Midlothian" is a different job than getting named for "in Richmond," and both are winnable while local competitors are still ignoring AI entirely.
AI search (GEO/AEO) service areas include Richmond, Henrico, Chesterfield, Midlothian, Glen Allen, Short Pump, Mechanicsville, and Bon Air. The same structured data and answer-first content that earns AI mentions also strengthens your local SEO in Richmond, so the two compound.
Want to see where you stand in AI answers today? Run your site through the free SEO & AI visibility checker.
Common questions
What is GEO / AEO?
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) are the practice of optimizing your business to be cited and recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude — the way SEO optimizes for Google rankings.
How is it different from regular SEO?
SEO earns you a spot in a list of links. GEO earns you a mention inside the AI's answer itself. The tactics overlap maybe 20% — structured data, answer-first writing, and citation building matter far more for AI than backlinks and keywords do.
How do you measure AI search visibility?
Directly: I ask the major AI engines the questions your customers ask — "best [your service] in Richmond" and variations — and track whether you're named, what's said, and how that changes month to month, alongside referral traffic from AI sources in your analytics.
How many Richmond businesses are actually ready for AI search?
Very few. In a random sample of 2,500 registered Richmond-metro businesses audited in August 2026, 73.7% of those with a live website had no llms.txt file and 40.6% carried no Schema.org structured data at all. The full study, methodology, and dataset are published at data.rvadigitalworks.com.
Does a small local business really need this?
Need? Not yet. Benefit from? Yes — especially now. AI recommendations tend to name only two or three businesses, the early data shows AI-referred visitors convert around 4x better, and almost no local competitors are optimizing for it. Early movers keep those slots.
See what AI says about your business
I'll ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity the exact questions your customers ask — and send you a plain-English report on whether you're named, what they say, and the specific gaps to fix. Free, no pressure, even if we never work together.