For twenty years, “getting found online” meant one thing: ranking on Google. Today, a growing share of people are asking ChatGPT, typing into Google’s AI Overviews, or using Perplexity to get a direct answer — often without ever clicking through to a website. If you’re a plumber, an attorney, a contractor, or a course provider, the question isn’t just “do I rank on Google” anymore. It’s: when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation in your space, does your business get mentioned at all?

For most small businesses right now, the answer is no — not because they’re doing anything wrong, but because almost nobody is optimizing for this yet. That’s an opportunity.

Part 1What AEO and GEO Actually Mean

You’ll start seeing these terms more, so here’s the plain-English version:

• AEO (AI Engine Optimization) — making sure AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can find, understand, and confidently recommend your business when someone asks a relevant question.
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — the broader practice of shaping your content so generative AI systems pull it into the answers they construct, rather than just linking to it.

Traditional SEO optimizes for a ranked list of blue links. AEO and GEO optimize for being the answer — or part of the answer — an AI gives someone directly.

Part 2Why This Is Different From SEO

AI systems don’t work like the Google of ten years ago. A few things matter more than they used to:

Clear, structured information wins. AI models favor content that’s easy to parse and extract — clean headings, direct answers to specific questions, and well-organized service descriptions.

Structured data and schema markup matter more, not less. Schema tells search engines and AI systems exactly what your business is, what you offer, and where you operate — in a format machines can read instantly instead of inferring.

Consistency across the web carries more weight. AI tools often cross-reference multiple sources — your website, your Google Business Profile, review sites, industry directories — before deciding you’re a trustworthy answer.

Being specific beats being broad. “We provide excellent legal services” tells an AI system nothing usable. “We handle title and lien disputes for Pennsylvania consumers dealing with repossession” gives it something to actually match against a real question.

The business that shows up is the one whose information was structured, specific, and consistent enough for the AI to confidently surface it.

Part 3What This Looks Like in Practice

A few examples of the shift:

• Someone asks ChatGPT “who’s a good SEO consultant near Philadelphia” instead of Googling it.
• A parent asks an AI assistant to compare dog training certification programs instead of scrolling through ten tabs.
• A homeowner asks “what should I do if my car got repossessed in PA” and gets a direct answer — with or without your firm mentioned.

Part 4What You Can Do About It

You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Start here:

• Audit your existing content for vague, generic language and rewrite the highest-value pages to be specific about who you serve and what problem you solve.
• Add or clean up schema markup on your key pages — service, location, and organization schema in particular.
• Standardize your business information across your website, Google Business Profile, and major directories so nothing conflicts.
• Build content around real questions your customers actually ask — not just keywords, but real phrasing.
• Test it yourself. Ask ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview the kinds of questions your customers would ask, and see whether your business shows up.

Where Ten Ninety Media Fits In

This is exactly the gap our AI Visibility & Optimization service is built to close — auditing how AI systems currently see your business, fixing the structural and content issues holding you back, and building a presence that shows up whether someone’s Googling you or asking an AI assistant for a recommendation.

“AI for business” tends to conjure up images of data scientists, custom models, and six-figure implementation budgets. That’s the enterprise version. The small business version looks nothing like that — it’s an owner using a $20-a-month tool to save two hours a week, or a solo operator finally getting quotes out the same day instead of three days later.

None of this requires hiring anyone new or learning to code. Here are five ways small businesses are actually putting AI to work right now.

1Answering Customers Faster

The most common entry point is customer communication. Businesses are using AI chat tools to draft responses to common questions — pricing, availability, service areas — so the owner or office manager isn’t retyping the same answer for the fortieth time. Some go further with a chatbot on their website that handles simple questions after hours and only escalates the complicated ones to a human.

The win here isn’t replacing the conversation — it’s removing the repetitive 80% so the time you do spend on the phone or in email goes to the calls that actually need a human judgment call.

2Writing First Drafts, Not Final Copy

Proposals, job descriptions, follow-up emails, social captions, even the first pass at a contract clause — AI is good at getting a blank page 70% of the way there. The business still reviews and finalizes everything, but starting from a draft instead of a blank screen is where most of the time savings live.

This is especially useful for the tasks owners tend to put off precisely because starting is the hardest part — a testimonial request email, an overdue invoice reminder, a job posting that’s been “getting to it” for two weeks.

3Cleaning Up the Busywork

A lot of small business AI use is unglamorous and exactly where it should be: summarizing a long email thread before a call, turning messy meeting notes into a clean action list, reformatting a spreadsheet, or pulling the key numbers out of a report someone forwarded you at 4pm on a Friday.

None of this is exciting. All of it is the kind of task that eats 15 minutes here and 20 minutes there — the hours you never get back and can never quite account for at the end of the week.

The small business version of “AI for business” isn’t a data science project — it’s an owner getting two hours of their week back.

4Getting Smarter About Who to Target

On the marketing and sales side, businesses are using AI to research prospects before a call, draft the first version of a cold outreach sequence, or sort through a list of leads to flag the ones worth calling first. It won’t replace a real sales process, but it removes a lot of the manual research that used to eat up the morning before anyone picked up a phone.

5Making Sense of Their Own Data

Most small businesses are sitting on more useful information than they realize — sales by month, which services get the most calls, where leads actually come from. AI tools are increasingly good at taking a plain-English question (“which service brought in the most revenue last quarter?”) and pulling the answer straight out of a spreadsheet, without anyone needing to know a formula.

Where to Actually Start

The businesses getting the most out of this aren’t running a company-wide AI initiative — they picked one repetitive task, found a tool that handles it well, and expanded from there once it proved itself. That’s a far more realistic starting point than trying to “adopt AI” all at once.

If you’re not sure which task in your business is the right place to start, that’s exactly the kind of question our AI for Business consulting is built to answer.

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