Get Seen by the Robots: the AEO-REX field guide to AI visibility

Section 01

Read this bit or the rest won't land

Here is the uncomfortable thing. Somebody in your postcode asked ChatGPT "who's the best [what you do] near me" this week. It gave them three names. You were probably not one of them. Not because you're worse — because the machine has never been properly introduced to you.

That's the whole guide. Everything from here is the introduction, done properly, in an order you can actually follow. No "leverage synergistic AI paradigms." You'll be copying and pasting things, ringing your web person, and asking customers for reviews. It's admin with a very good ROI.

Two honest warnings. One: some of this gets technical enough that you may decide life is short and hand it to us — that's fine, that's literally the business model: the audit is £595, credited in full against implementation, and the prices are published. Two: anyone promising you a permanent number one spot inside ChatGPT is selling you a horoscope. This is a visibility discipline, not a cheat code.

Section 02

Who is this guide for?

Plumbers, dentists, agencies, cafés, ecommerce shops, clinics, accountants, gyms, consultants, anyone who has ever paid for SEO and quietly wondered what happened. If you have a website and customers, you are in scope. If you have a Shopify store, chapter 8 is where the money is.

What you'll leave with: a finished audit, a fixed profile, a page written the way machines quote things, and a 30-day plan with dates on it.

What you won't get: hacks, "one weird trick", or fake numbers. Every claim in here has a name and a date attached in the sources list.

Section 03

The 90-second version

Search used to be a list of ten blue links, and your job was to be one of them. Now an assistant reads the internet on your customer's behalf and hands over one paragraph with two or three names in it. Being on page one of Google and being in the answer are now two different jobs — though how much of your existing SEO carries over depends on which AI surface your customers use; chapter 1 has the numbers. Here's the short version of the second job.

1. Be one business, not five. Same name, same address, same phone number on Google, Bing, Yelp, Companies House, your footer. Contradictions make you look sketchy to a machine, and machines don't recommend sketchy.
2. Get talked about somewhere that isn't your own website. Reviews, directories, forums, a local "best of" list, a podcast, a supplier's case study. AI trusts what others say about you more than your homepage adjectives.
3. Answer the question in the first sentence. Then prove it with a number, a date, a price, a name. That's the shape of text a model can lift into an answer without risking making something up.
4. Let the robots in, and label the furniture. Don't block AI crawlers by accident, and add structured data so your prices, hours and services are readable rather than guessable.
5. Check what the assistants currently say about you. Monthly. In writing. Because "I assume we're fine" is not a metric, and the answer changes without telling you.

That's it. That's the strategy. The remaining chapters are just the same five things with the receipts, the copy-paste bits, and the parts where you're allowed to swear.

Section 04

Contents: the twelve chapters

1. What actually changedThe numbers, with receipts.
2. How a robot picks who to recommendThe four layers.
3. The 45-minute audit you can do todayKettle on.
4. Fix your identity before anything elseOne name, one number, everywhere.
5. Reviews are now a data feedNot a vanity badge.
6. Write pages a machine can quoteThe answer-first rewrite.
7. The technical bit (deep breath)Schema, llms.txt, crawlers.
8. Getting agent-ready for agentic commerceWhere it gets spicy.
9. Measuring it without lying to yourselfYour analytics is fibbing.
10. Your 30-day planPrintable, tickable, done.
11. Six ways people waste money on thisDon't be number four.
12. Glossary, sources and what to do nextIncluding the cheap option.

Shortcut for the impatient: run the free audit at tools.aeo-rex.com first. It tells you which chapters are actually your problem, so you can skip the ones that aren't. Takes less time than reading this page.

Section 05

Download the PDF version

This page and the twelve chapters are the canonical version of the guide. If you prefer paper or want to send it to somebody: Download the PDF version (free, no email gate). Share it, print it, send it to whoever needs it.