Can AI recommend your business?

Here's a two-minute test worth doing with your morning coffee. Open ChatGPT — or just Google something and look at the AI answer that now sits above the results — and ask the question your customers would ask. "Who's a good paver near Gawler?" "Best cellar door for lunch in the Barossa?" "Can you recommend a pest controller in Nuriootpa?"

Read the answer. Is your business in it?

That question matters more every month, because this is genuinely how people search now. They're not scrolling ten blue links — they're asking an assistant and taking the two or three names it gives back. We wrote about the shift a couple of weeks ago; since then it's only picked up pace.

The jargon, translated

You might see this called GEO (generative engine optimisation) or AEO (answer engine optimisation). Fancy names for a simple idea: old-school SEO was about ranking on a results page; this is about being the answer. Making sure that when an AI reads the web to answer "who should I call?", your business is easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to trust.

The good news for Barossa businesses: almost nobody around here is doing it on purpose yet.

What we build into every site

No tricks, no guarantees — nobody can honestly promise you a spot in an AI answer. What you can do is give the assistants clean, truthful material to work with. Every site we build ships with:

An llms.txt file. A plain-text summary of who you are, what you do and where — written specifically for AI crawlers to read. Like a business card left at the front door for the robots.

Structured data. Machine-readable facts behind the page: your name, address, hours, services, and only the reviews you've genuinely earned. AI doesn't guess well; this means it doesn't have to.

Real answers to real questions. Pages that plainly answer the things people actually ask — what does it cost, do you cover my town, how long does it take. When an assistant needs a sentence to quote, honest and plain wins.

The same details everywhere. Assistants cross-check. If your phone number on Facebook doesn't match your website, that reads as doubt — so we keep your details consistent everywhere your business appears.

And now we watch the answers

The newer bit: we now keep track of how our clients actually show up across ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity and Claude. Not vanity reports — just an honest read on whether the assistants are noticing, so we know what's working.

All of this is already built into every site we do — it's not an add-on or an upsell. If you ran the coffee test and didn't like the answer, get in touch and we'll take a look at what the AI currently sees when it reads your business.