A decade ago, someone looking for a plumber in your town typed "plumber near me" into Google and clicked one of the top three results. That's it. One front door. If you ranked, you won.
Today that same person might type the search into Google, or ask ChatGPT, or ask Perplexity, or say it out loud to their phone. They might never see a blue link at all. They see an answer, maybe with a few sources cited underneath. Search has two front doors now, and most small businesses are still only watching one of them.
The good news: local SEO and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) overlap more than they differ. Get the fundamentals right and you show up in both.
What AEO actually is
AEO is the practice of making your business understandable and quotable to answer engines. An answer engine is anything that synthesizes an answer from the web instead of handing over a list of links. Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. They all work the same way under the hood: they read sources, pick the ones that seem authoritative, and paraphrase.
Which means the game isn't just "rank high." It's also "be the source the model quotes." Those are related but not identical. A model might quote a page that ranks fifth on Google if that page has clearer information than the four above it.
Local SEO fundamentals still do most of the heavy lifting
Before you worry about AI anything, the local SEO basics still matter. They're what gets you on the map, literally. Skip them and neither Google nor ChatGPT knows you exist.
Google Business Profile. Claim it, fill out every field, add real photos, pick accurate categories. This is the single highest-leverage thing a local business can do. It feeds Google Maps, the local pack, and gets scraped by answer engines looking for "best X in Y."
NAP consistency. Name, address, phone. Pick one format and use it identically everywhere: your website, your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, industry directories. A missing suite number or a formatted phone number that doesn't match confuses both Google and LLMs. They think you might be two different businesses.
Reviews. Volume and recency both matter. A business with 80 reviews from the last year beats one with 200 reviews that stopped coming in two years ago. Ask every happy customer. Make it one link, one click. Respond to every review, good or bad.
Location pages. If you serve multiple towns, each should have its own page with specific content. Not "we serve the greater Salt Lake area" on one generic page. A real page for Sandy, another for Draper, another for Midvale. With neighborhoods, landmarks, and specifics a human would actually recognize.
What AEO adds on top
Once the fundamentals are in place, AEO is mostly about writing and structuring your content so a language model can lift the exact sentence it needs. Models don't skim. They parse. They reward clarity the way humans reward brevity.
Answer the question in the first sentence. If a page is about "how much does a roof replacement cost in Salt Lake," the first sentence should give a real number range. Not a three-paragraph preamble about the history of your company. Models quote the sentence that answers the query. If that sentence is buried, they quote a competitor.
Use question-shaped headings. "How long does it take?" "What's included in the price?" "Do you work on weekends?" These mirror how people type and speak queries, and they give LLMs an obvious hook for extracting an answer. FAQ sections are underrated for exactly this reason.
Add structured data. Schema.org markup for LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ, and Review is machine-readable metadata that tells search engines and LLMs what your page is about without guesswork. It's not magic, but it's the difference between a model correctly identifying you as a plumber in Orem versus treating your page as generic.
Be specific with numbers and names. "We've installed over 400 water heaters" beats "we install a lot of water heaters." LLMs love concrete facts and will quote them verbatim. Vague marketing copy gets paraphrased into blandness or skipped entirely.
Where the two strategies overlap
This is the part most businesses miss: you don't need two separate content strategies. Almost everything that makes a page rank well on Google also makes it quotable to an LLM. Clear headings. Direct answers. Real expertise. Original data. First-hand experience. Fast pages. Mobile-friendly layouts.
The biggest overlap is trust signals. Google's ranking system and every major LLM both try to figure out: is this source credible? They look at the same things. Real reviews, real photos, a real address, consistent information across the web, backlinks from local news sites or chambers of commerce, years in business. A small business that nails these shows up in both worlds without doing anything AI-specific.
Five things to do this month
You can't overhaul everything in a week. Pick these five and work through them in order. Each one moves the needle in both Google and answer engines.
1. Audit your Google Business Profile. Every field filled. Real photos from the last six months. Correct hours, including holidays. The exact services you offer. A few recent posts. This takes an hour and it's the highest-ROI hour you'll spend all year.
2. Fix your NAP everywhere. Search your business name in Google. Every result that lists your address or phone should match your Google Business Profile exactly. Yelp, Facebook, Bing Places, Apple Maps, old directory sites. Fix the wrong ones or ask to have them removed.
3. Write one real FAQ page. Ten actual questions your customers ask, each with a clear answer in the first sentence. No fluff. This single page will end up doing a disproportionate amount of work in both Google and LLM results.
4. Add schema markup. At minimum, LocalBusiness schema on your homepage and FAQ schema on your FAQ page. If you use WordPress, a plugin does this. If you have a custom site, it's a copy-paste into the head of the page.
5. Ask for five reviews. Five real customers, five personalized asks, one Google review link. Do this every month and in a year you'll have moved from invisible to obvious.
How to measure it
Traditional SEO has analytics dashboards. AEO does not, yet. You won't get a neat report saying "ChatGPT recommended your business 47 times this week." So measurement is a little scrappy.
Once a month, run the same five queries a potential customer would run. "Best roofer in Orem." "Plumber Salt Lake weekend emergency." "Email marketing agency Utah." Try each in Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Write down which businesses show up, cited, or get recommended. Track it in a spreadsheet. Over a few months you'll see yourself climb, or you'll see exactly what's missing.
The short version
Local SEO and AEO aren't two separate projects. They're the same project with two scoreboards. Clean up your Google Business Profile, keep your NAP consistent, collect reviews, answer real questions clearly on your website, and add structured data so machines can read it. That's 90% of the work for both.
Answer engines aren't a new channel to bolt on. They're a new way of reading the same web you're already on. Make your site easy to read and you'll show up wherever someone is searching, whether that's a Google results page or a conversation with a model.