Answer engine optimization, or AEO, makes your business readable and quotable by the chatbots and agents people use to ask for recommendations: Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google’s AI answers, Copilot and more.
R7 Creative builds AEO into every site and page we create for you, without ever charging more for it.
SEO ranks your site in search engines. AEO gets it cited and quoted by the AI giving the answer to your customer. If you want the longer version of why that shift happened, I wrote it up in why your website now has to be readable by AI.
Why does AEO matter for local businesses?
The number of people who use AI to search for businesses is growing quickly, and an AI answer reads as authoritative. The person who gets it trusts it. If your business can’t be seen by that AI, your business doesn’t exist to that customer.
How do you find out where you stand?
Go ask. It takes one minute and doesn’t require us. Open Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google’s AI Mode. Type what your customer would type — “top t shirt embroidery in ashland ohio” — and see who gets named. In the results below, Google’s AI Mode put Just Name It at the top for that exact search. R7 Creative rebuilt their website.
What makes your site discoverable to an AI?
Four things: structure, schema, plain answers and speed.
Structure. Headings that map to real questions, answered in the first sentence.
Schema. Markup naming what your business is, what you sell, where you work and more.
Plain answers. Put real prices on your page instead of “contact us for a quote.” A number is retrievable.
Speed and security. Your fast, secure, mobile-first site gets crawled and cited before others. A slow one gets skipped.
Then new pages every month, each one answering a real question your customer asks.
What does AEO cost you?
Nothing separately. AEO sits inside every website we build, at a price you can already see.
- Your website build: $2,375 plus a $350 setup, then $150/mo for hosting, lead forms and unlimited reasonable updates. Amortized, that’s $348/mo all in for twelve months. Every website number is here.
- Monthly pages: $250/mo for two, or $475 for a one-off. Each page is another question your business is answering.
We, like everybody else, can’t guarantee an AI answer engine citation. The AI companies publish no ranking system and guarantee nobody exposure. Anyone promising you a spot in an AI’s answer is selling something they can’t control.
Is anyone else in your market offering this?
Look for yourself. Search for a marketing company in your city and view the page source. You’re looking for JSON-LD structured data — the block that names what a business is. A firm that structures its own pages that way is a firm that will structure yours the same.
Is your business their answer?
Run the search first. R7 Creative does this work for businesses in Mansfield, Ashland, Wooster and Wadsworth, Ohio, and across Richland, Ashland, Wayne, Holmes, Knox and Medina counties. The work is the same in every one of them: structure, schema, plain answers, speed.
Then, when you want your business to be the one the AI names:
Talk to us → or start with your Google profile, free →
Related: why your website has to be readable by AI · what Google looks at to rank local businesses · how R7 works.