What is AI Visibility (also called GEO or AEO)?

AI Visibility is the practice of optimizing a website so that AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot — can find, parse, and cite the business when users ask relevant questions. It's the AI-era equivalent of search engine optimization (SEO). The two acronyms in use are GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).

Why do most small business websites have zero AI Visibility?

Because the technical requirements only crystallized in late 2024 and early 2025, and most web designers haven't caught up. The work involves Schema.org structured data, FAQPage markup, an llms.txt file, an explicit AI crawler allowlist in robots.txt, citation-friendly content patterns, and per-page canonical signals. None of these were standard practice when most SMB sites were built.

How does Refined Solutions IT's AI Visibility service work?

Three tiers. Audit ($297) is a written report scanning your site against the full GEO checklist with a prioritized fix list. Setup (from $1,500) is the done-for-you implementation across schema, llms.txt, robots.txt, FAQ markup, and content patterns. Retainer (scoped per engagement) is ongoing monthly monitoring of citation rate in major AI engines plus iteration on content and schema as those engines evolve.

How long does AI Visibility Setup take?

Most local small business sites take 4 to 8 hours of focused work spread across a 1 to 2 week window. Larger sites with hundreds of pages take longer because the schema markup has to be templated. You receive a written handoff documenting every change.

How do I know if it's working?

Two ways. First, you can directly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude questions a customer might ask about your business and see if you're cited. Second, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools will start showing impressions from AI Overviews within a few weeks. The Retainer tier formalizes this measurement and runs it monthly.

AI Visibility

When someone asks Google AI Mode or ChatGPT about your business, what do they see?

Google announced at I/O 2026 that AI Mode now serves over 1 billion monthly users — bigger than AI Overviews, bigger than any prior AI search product, and queries are doubling every quarter. Add ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Bing Copilot, and you have the surface where the majority of search now happens. All of them pull from sites that speak their language: Schema.org structured data, FAQPage markup, llms.txt, AI‑crawler allowlists, citation-friendly content patterns.

Most small business sites have none of this. Which means when a potential customer asks "best [thing you sell] near [your town]," the AI hands them a competitor — or worse, makes up an answer with no citation at all. Google's new Generative UI in Search builds custom layouts on the fly from structured data, which makes the gap between sites that have schema and sites that don't even wider than it was before I/O.

Just released · May 2026

Want to DIY? Get the playbook for $29.

31 pages, copy-paste templates, 30-question self-audit, post-I/O 2026 framing. Same methodology we use on client Setups.

Get the Playbook →

The checklist

What it actually takes — and what most sites are missing.

We audit your site against this exact list. Here's a rough sense of where typical small business sites land before any work is done.

Signal	What it does	Typical SMB site
Schema.org LocalBusiness / Organization JSON-LD	Tells AI exactly what business you are, where, hours, contact	Missing
FAQPage schema for common customer questions	Lets AI lift direct Q&A answers and attribute them to you	Missing
Service / Product / Offer schema	Surfaces pricing and offerings in answer cards	Missing
llms.txt file at the site root	Tells AI engines how to read and cite your site	Missing
Explicit AI bot allowlist in robots.txt (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, etc.)	Some sites accidentally block AI crawlers via default rules	Often blocked or missing
Open Graph + Twitter Card tags with OG image	Powers rich previews when AI answers cite a link	Sometimes
Sitemap with priority + lastmod + changefreq	Helps AI crawlers prioritize fresh content	Basic sitemap, no priorities
Canonical URLs on every page	Prevents duplicate-content confusion in AI indexes	Inconsistent
Citation-friendly content pattern (TL;DR up top, direct Q&A, specific numbers)	AI preferentially quotes prose written to be quotable	Missing
Author / Person schema with consistent attribution	Builds citable authority around named people in your business	Missing
Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster Tools verified	Where you measure AI-driven impressions and adjust	Sometimes GSC, rarely Bing
Accessibility statement + keyboard-nav + semantic HTML	Modern AI parsers reward accessible markup; humans need it anyway	Missing
Optimized for Google AI Mode + Generative UI in Search (I/O 2026)	AI Mode is now Google's biggest AI surface (1B+ users) and dynamically builds custom UI from your structured data	Most not aware yet
WebMCP-readiness (forward-looking, new I/O 2026 standard)	Exposes site tools to browser-based AI agents so they can transact, not just read	Brand-new — almost no one

You don't need every row checked. You need enough of them, in the right order, that AI engines can find you, parse you, and cite you when the question is relevant. That's the work.

What's coming next

Two shifts that just landed at Google I/O 2026.

Information Agents

Google's new Information Agents monitor blogs, news, social posts, and real-time data on behalf of users. When something relevant to a tracked topic ships, they send a synthesized update with citations. Translation: consistent publishing cadence is now a live ranking signal, not just a SEO trick. Sites with daily content (blog posts, product updates, press) get visited by these agents and surface in those updates. Sites that haven't published since 2022 don't.

Refined Solutions IT runs the daily-publishing pipeline at agent-built.com as a live example. The same approach is offered as our Content & SEO retainer for clients who don't want to author posts themselves.

WebMCP — the next standard

Google also proposed a new open standard called WebMCP, exposing site tools (JavaScript functions, HTML forms) as structured capabilities that browser-based AI agents can call directly. Sites that adopt this early will be the ones AI agents can actually transact with — not just read.

The standard is still settling, but adoption is going to follow the same curve as schema.org did a decade ago: the businesses that ship it first will own the agentic-shopping and agentic-booking surface in their categories. We're tracking the spec and will fold it into Setup engagements as soon as the API stabilizes — existing Retainer clients get it included.

The tiers

Three ways to get from invisible to cited.

Audit

$297

Written report scanning your site against the full GEO/AEO checklist above. Delivered within 3 business days. You get prioritized recommendations — what to fix first, what to fix later, what doesn't matter for your business. Yours to keep, implement, hand to your dev team, or roll into the Setup tier (audit fee credits toward setup).

Order audit

Setup

from $1,500

Done-for-you implementation. Schema.org structured data per page, FAQPage schema, llms.txt, AI crawler allowlist in robots.txt, OG/Twitter cards, citation-friendly content rewrites where useful, GSC + Bing verification. Written handoff documenting every change. Typically 1–2 weeks for a local SMB site.

Scope setup

Retainer

Scoped

Monthly check on whether you're being cited by major AI engines, content adjustments based on what's working, schema updates as new standards land. Right for businesses where AI-citation actually moves revenue. Scoped per engagement based on site size and update cadence.

Discuss retainer

Proof

Sites running the full setup right now.

You can inspect any of these. Run them through any schema validator. Check their robots.txt, llms.txt, sitemap. Compare to your own site. The difference is the work.

refinedsolutionsit.com — this site
agent-built.com — daily-publishing blog, fully optimized per post
agentalmanac.org — 9,000+ page catalog, schema on every entry

Ready to find out where your site stands?

Start with the Audit. Three business days, $297, written report with concrete fixes. Credit applies if you book the Setup after.

Start with the Audit