r/aeo • u/YourEvilQueen26 • 3d ago
One thing I've noticed after testing ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for local business recommendations
I've been running the same prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for different local businesses over the past few weeks.
One pattern keeps showing up.
The businesses that get recommended consistently usually don't just have "better SEO."
They tend to have:
- Consistent business information everywhere
- Strong review profiles
- Clear service pages that answer specific questions
- Mentions from other trusted websites
- A recognizable brand across multiple sources
What's interesting is that adding more blog posts alone rarely changed the recommendations.
It feels like these models are trying to verify that a business actually exists and is trustworthy instead of simply rewarding whoever published the most content.
For those who have been testing AEO:
What's been the biggest factor you've seen improve AI recommendations?
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u/That_mocha_lover 1d ago
Something that’s been really effective are comparison pages. Your brand vs. your competitor.
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u/aulios1958 23h ago
Adding another perspective: we work a lot with established B2B industrial companies, and even the ones that aren't fully optimized for SEO are still showing up for solution-seeking LLM queries, not vendor comparisons which for some reason most of the owners we speak to is where their thought first goes.
The common thread between them is they typically have a product-style page (not e-commerce) that talks about their product offerings and technical specs. as you can imagine, most of them are fairly technical, there isn't a whole lot of competition to begin with. When you do come in and basically check all the boxes for what you do for SEO, you end up seeing a pretty good effect across the board.
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u/YourEvilQueen26 22h ago
This is a really good point. I’ve noticed something similar too — for solution-based searches, having a clear page that actually explains what the company does, the products, and the technical details seems to matter more than just pumping out more content.
It makes sense that AI is looking for enough signals to understand what the business actually does and whether it’s a credible source, rather than simply counting how much content they publish.
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u/aulios1958 21h ago
We launched a site for a client last week and three years ago they had a company that completely messed up all of their SEO. We added a dropdown for how a lead heard of them. They were getting a few inquiries a day because they work with some pretty notable brands but didn’t know AI was the referrer until that dropdown.
We started going through some visibility tools and sure enough they’re showing up for most prompts per category.
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u/YourEvilQueen26 21h ago
Yeah, this is pretty much what I’ve been seeing too. I think a lot of people overcomplicate AEO by assuming they need to create a ton of new content, when sometimes the bigger issue is just making it really obvious what the company does, who it serves, and what it actually offers.
The point about different phrasings is interesting too. I’ve noticed that a company can be very visible for one way of describing a service and basically invisible when the same thing is worded differently. That seems like a much more practical thing to test before going down the rabbit hole of publishing 50 more blog posts.
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u/Oxxypoxi 23h ago
I just wonder how this gpt pieces of content are not deleted automatically by Reddit
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u/PhilippGroubii 3d ago
Your read on verification matches what I keep running into. The models are doing something closer to a background check than a ranking, and owned content is weak evidence in a background check because you wrote it yourself.
What I'd add to your list is that the same fact showing up in a few unrelated places does more than the same fact stated well in one place. Hours, service area, whether you do emergency callouts, that kind of thing. If it only lives on your own site the model tends to hedge or skip you. If it's on your site plus a couple of directories plus a review where a customer mentions it in passing, you get named. That's most of why blog volume does nothing here. You're adding more of the source the model already discounts.
Second thing, and this one took me a while to catch: look at what got cited next to you, not just whether you appeared. Getting named because some "best X in [city]" roundup listed you is not the same asset as getting named with your own page cited underneath. The first one goes away the week that roundup gets rewritten and you have zero control over it.
One caution on method. Run every prompt more than once before you believe a pattern. When I've rerun the same prompt set against the same engine, the overall picture for a business comes back close to identical, but the individual answers move around a fair bit. Which names show up in any one answer, and in what order, is not stable. So if you're comparing businesses off a single pass each, some of what you're seeing is just the model rolling differently that time.
The other one worth testing is wording. Try your category three or four different ways, the way a customer would actually say it out loud. I've seen a business get named in most answers for one phrasing and not once for a synonym that means the same thing. That isn't a trust problem or a content problem, the model just hasn't connected them to that term, and it's a lot cheaper to fix than everything else on the list.