AEO for Local Businesses
If you run a local business, you already know how much your traffic depends on someone in your zip code asking a question. The question used to land in Google. Now it lands in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews. The decision about whether your business appears in that answer happens upstream of the user clicking anything. AEO is what gets you into that answer.
What changes when AI is the discovery layer
Old behavior: a customer types "plumber near me", scrolls a Google Maps list, calls two or three businesses, books one. New behavior: a customer asks ChatGPT "who is a good plumber in Cincinnati for water heater work". ChatGPT names two businesses with confidence. The customer calls one. The other plumbers in town never knew the conversation happened. AEO is what determines which two businesses get named.
The foundation: LocalBusiness schema
Every local business needs LocalBusiness JSON-LD on the homepage. At minimum: name, address (use PostalAddress with streetAddress, addressLocality, addressRegion, postalCode, addressCountry), telephone, openingHoursSpecification, geo coordinates, areaServed, and a list of services. Many local sites are missing half of this. Without it, AI engines have no machine-readable way to confirm where you are or what you offer. They will skip you for a competitor whose schema is complete.
Geographic specificity in your content
Mention your city, your neighborhood, and any relevant landmarks by name in your homepage copy. Not as keyword stuffing. As natural sentences. AI engines extract location signals from the text the same way they extract them from schema. A roofing company that says "we serve homeowners in Northeast Philadelphia, including Fox Chase, Holmesburg, and Bustleton" is much more citable for queries about those neighborhoods than one that just says "we serve the Philadelphia area".
Reviews and citations from the local web
Local AI citation is heavily influenced by what shows up about you on Google Business Profile, Yelp, and the local press. If your business has 12 Google reviews and your competitor has 200, AI engines will lean toward the competitor unless something about you is more relevant to the specific query. Run a quarterly review generation cycle: send the review request automatically after every appointment, every job completion, every transaction. Make the link one click. Reply to every review. AI engines see review velocity and response rate as a trust signal.
Free score and what to expect
Run a free AEO score on your site at engagemii.com/aeo. Most local businesses start in the 3 to 5 range. After a focused week deploying LocalBusiness schema, an llms.txt file, robots.txt allowlists, and a few content tweaks, the typical score lift is 2 to 4 points. That is the range where AI engines start citing you instead of your competitors. The audit is free. The work is straightforward. The cost of being invisible to AI for another quarter is the actual question worth asking.
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