Here’s a shift that’s happening faster than most Australian businesses realise: people are starting to ask an AI assistant for recommendations instead of typing into Google. “Who builds practical AI tools for a small clinic in Melbourne?” If the assistant has never been allowed to read your site, you simply don’t exist in that answer.
SEO got you found on Google. AIEO gets you cited by AI.
The discipline has a name now — AIEO (AI Engine Optimisation), sometimes GEO. The good news: most of what makes you visible to AI assistants also strengthens your normal Google ranking. They’re not two separate jobs.
The bad news: a lot of sites are accidentally blocking the AI crawlers that would cite them. If you’re on Cloudflare, its default settings may be turning ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI away at the door without you knowing. (This was true of our own old site — we fixed it the day we rebuilt.)
What actually moves the needle
- Let the crawlers in. Check your
robots.txtand your CDN settings actually allow AI assistant bots. This is step zero. - Answer real questions, directly. Lead each page or post with a plain answer, then the detail. Assistants quote the bit that answers the question.
- Be genuinely useful and specific. Original, opinionated, data-backed writing gets cited. Thin marketing copy gets ignored.
- Show who’s behind it. A real, named author with real expertise (what Google calls E-E-A-T) is a signal both Google and AI assistants weigh heavily.
- Add an
llms.txt. A simple file that helps AI systems understand your site’s structure.
If a customer asks an AI for “someone like you” and your brand isn’t in the answer, that’s a sale going to whoever was.
Why I’m betting on this
We rebuilt our own site around exactly this idea — answer-first content, structured data, AI crawlers explicitly welcomed, a real human author. Not as a trick, but because being the honest, citable answer is the most durable kind of marketing there is. It compounds while you sleep.
If you want to know whether AI assistants can currently see and cite your business — and what it’d take to be the answer they give — a free website check is a five-minute place to start.