Generative engine optimization: be a name the assistants give out
A free check of what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and the Gemini app say when your customers ask who to call.
- One agreed description of your business, used word for word on every listing
- Wrong listings claimed, corrected and merged, one support ticket at a time
- Your customers' questions put to each assistant monthly, answers saved as written
- An honest evaluation, with no obligation to hire us
- You own every account, domain, profile and CRM
- One team since 2015, nothing subcontracted
- 4,700+ businesses served
Written for local business owners who want the phone to ring. Agencies that sell AI visibility to their clients have our team do this same work white-label: see the partner model.
AI SEO, GEO and AEO: what you buy from us.
Beyaoshy sells AI SEO as a monthly service, in three parts named for where the answer appears. This page is the assistants outside Google: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and the Gemini app.Answer engine optimization covers the boxes where Google quotes one of your pages. AI search optimizationcovers Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Most clients take all three as one plan, because the same listings, mentions and pages feed each of them.
It fits local businesses, national brands, lead generation sites and online stores, where the questions are about products and the answers lean on review and comparison pages. Agencies resell it under their own name. The monthly fee is set after the free check, because a business with forty wrong listings needs a different month from one with four, and we do not publish it.
A month of it includes
- Your customers' questions put to each assistant while logged out, every answer saved as written
- Listing claims, corrections and merges, chased until each ticket closes
- Requests to associations, suppliers, chambers and local press that have a reason to list you
- One page each month: what we asked, what came back, what we changed
A model names the businesses it can check.
Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for a good plumber in your town and you do not get ten links. You get two or three names. Those names come from what the wider web can tell a model about you, not from your website on its own, which is why this work happens mostly off your site.
An assistant is not reading your website the way a customer does. It has read an enormous amount of the web, and when someone asks who to call, it leans on what several independent sources appear to agree on. Your own site is a claim. A chamber roster, a trade directory, a supplier locator, a news story and a few hundred reviews that all describe the same company, at the same address, doing the same work, is a claim other people back up. Models name businesses they can back up.
One source, no way to check it
Say you are a roofer in a mid-sized city. Your website says you are the best in town and you have been at it for years. Nothing else on the open web confirms it or contradicts it. The model has a claim and no way to verify it, so it reaches for a business it can, and that business gets the call.
Several sources that agree
Same roofer. Now the same facts, in the same words, sit on your profile, two trade directories, the chamber roster, a manufacturer's certified installer list and a storm-season article in the local paper. The claim is checkable, the model is confident, and you are a safe name to give a stranger.
What the models are actually reading.
Five things decide whether you come up. Four of them are work we can do. The fifth is the result of the other four, and it is the one nobody can promise.
AI citations
The sources an assistant shows underneath its answer. Perplexity lists them as a matter of course and ChatGPT links them when it has searched the web. Being one of those links for the questions in your category is the most direct version of this whole job, and it goes to pages that answer a question cleanly on a site the model has reason to trust.
In practice: your service pages, and the third-party pages about you that already get pointed at.
LLM visibility
Whether you come up at all, across the spread of questions a customer would really type. Not one query. Thirty or forty, phrased several different ways, asked more than once, because these systems do not return the same answer every time and a single lucky result proves nothing.
In practice: a fixed prompt list, run every month, with the answers saved word for word.
Brand mentions
Being written about on pages you do not own. Directories, association rosters, supplier locators, chamber pages, event programs, local news, forum threads and roundups. A mention does not need to be a link to count. It needs to exist somewhere the model has read, and it needs to say the same thing your other mentions say.
In practice: the slow half of this work, and the half that moves it.
Entity signals
Whether the model understands you to be one business rather than three similar ones. Same legal name, same address, same service list, same categories, same hours, in the same wording everywhere it looks. Contradictions are not simply ignored. They lower confidence, and a model that is not confident names somebody else.
In practice: one written description, used everywhere without improvising.
AI recommendations
The end state: being one of the two or three names that come back. It is built out of the four above, it moves slowly, and it is never fully inside anyone's control. We treat it as the outcome we are working toward and the first four as the work we can actually put hours against.
In practice: reported as a share of answers over time, never as a yes or no.
Mostly fact-checking, done thoroughly, month after month.
There is no clever trick here and we are not going to invent one. Most of a month on this service goes on correcting information that is wrong in public and earning mentions from organizations that take a while to answer their email. That is the honest shape of it, and it is the order the work has to happen in.
Write the facts down once
One description, one business name, one address format, one service list, one set of hours. We agree it with you, keep it in a single document and stop improvising. It sounds too simple to matter. It is the reason everything after it holds together.
Find out what the web already says
We collect what is out there now: listings, profiles, old addresses, a previous owner's name, a number that no longer rings, two entries for one business, the wrong category. Then we ask the assistants directly and record the answers before we change anything, so there is a real starting point.
Correct the record
The unglamorous part. Claiming, editing and merging listings one form and one support ticket at a time. Some go through in a minute. Some take six weeks and a follow-up to a company that would rather not hear from you. This is the step most programs quietly skip, and skipping it caps everything else.
Earn mentions worth having
Association membership, manufacturer and supplier locators, chamber rosters, local sponsorships and press that has an actual reason to write about you. We go after places that are real, because the model's trust in the source is the entire point. Bought mentions on sites nobody reads do nothing here.
Make your own pages quotable
Clear service and area pages, plain answers to the questions you get asked on the phone, and an about page that states the facts instead of selling. This overlaps with answer engine optimization, so we do it once and both surfaces benefit.
Ask again, every month
The same prompt list, the same assistants, the same way of recording it. Answers move on their own, and the only way to know which direction yours are moving is to keep asking in a way that is comparable month to month.
When the client belongs to an agency
Partner agencies take this as a white-label workstream. Our team runs the prompt list, the listing corrections and the mention outreach, and the report goes back in the agency's template with the agency's name on it, so the client only ever deals with them. Agencies work with us this way, and Beyaoshy has served more than 4,700 businesses since 2015 across all of its services. See the partner model.
Agency, self-serve tool or in-house: who should run it?
Each of the three can do part of this job, and none does all of it on its own. The split that matters is between measuring the answers and changing what the web says about you. Tools are built for the first. The second is phone calls, support tickets and email, and it needs a person.
A self-serve tracker
Trackers put a list of prompts to the assistants on a schedule and chart how often you are named. That covers the measuring half at a volume nobody types by hand.
What it leaves to you: every fix. A tracker can show that a directory still lists your old address. It cannot file the correction, chase the directory six weeks later or get a supplier to add you to its dealer locator.
Watch for: a score built on one run per question, since the same question can return different names on the next run.
Pick it when someone in-house already does the fixing and wants a scoreboard.
Doing it in-house
Nobody knows your facts better, and the reporting side is free: the AI Assistant channel in Google Analytics and a monthly round of questions in each assistant cost nothing but time.
What it leaves to you: the hours. Corrections move on the directory's timetable, and getting onto a chamber roster or a manufacturer's list takes follow-ups spread over weeks.
Watch for: the month the person is busy with customers, which is the month the ticket queue goes quiet.
Pick it when one person can own the facts and the follow-ups every month, not just when there is time.
An agency
You buy the hours you do not have, a question list that stays the same month to month so the numbers compare, and people who have filed the same correction with the same directories before.
What it leaves to you: approving the one description of your business, and telling us which jobs or products you want more of.
Watch for: a promised placement, a report with no word-for-word answers in it, and accounts opened in the agency's name. With us, your profile, domain and tracking numbers are set up in yours.
Pick it when nobody on your side has the hours, or when the record is badly wrong.
Plenty of businesses land on a mix: someone on staff who owns the facts, a tracker or a monthly question panel for the scoreboard, and outside hours for the corrections and the requests. The free check tells you which parts you can keep.
Could you run this in-house?
Five yes-or-no questions. Your answers stay on this page.
Answer all five to see where you stand. Your answers stay on this page.
Send your name and city; get the assistants' answers back
The free AI visibility check starts with:
- What ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and the Gemini app say when asked who to call for your work
- The listings that contradict each other on your name, address or services
- The first places worth being listed, picked from the sources those answers cite
What an agency can control, and what it cannot.
Nobody outside OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft and Perplexity decides what their models say. Any AI SEO agency that guarantees you a spot in the answer is selling control it does not have. Here is where the line actually falls.
Inside our reach
- The one description of your business, and whether every listing matches it
- Which wrong or duplicate listings get claimed, corrected and reported, and how often we follow up
- Whether your own pages answer the questions customers ask, in plain words
- Whether your site is indexed in Google and Bing, which the assistants draw on when they search the web
- Which associations, suppliers and local outlets get asked to list you
- The question list, and recording every answer the same way each month
Outside anyone's reach
- Which sources a model trusts, and how much
- A new model version that changes the answers overnight
- Two people asking the same question and getting different names back
- When a directory gets around to acting on a correction, if it does
- What your reviewers write, and what a newer competitor earns
So we report the first list as work done and the second as weather. When the answers do not move after the work is done, you will hear that from us rather than reading a chart that avoids the subject.
Most of this never shows up in Google Analytics.
If you judge this work by the referral numbers in your analytics, you will conclude it did nothing. That is a measurement problem rather than a result, and it is worth understanding before you start paying for it.
The prompt panel
A fixed list of the questions your customers would really ask, run every month across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and the Gemini app, with the answers saved as written. The share of those answers that name you is the headline number we report.
Citation checks
Which pages get shown as sources when your category comes up, including pages about you that you do not own. This is the part you can act on fastest, because a missing citation usually points at a specific page that needs writing or a specific site that has you wrong.
The mention inventory
A running list of every place on the web that describes your business, what each one says and whether it is correct. It is dull in month one and genuinely useful by month four, when you can see it grow and see the contradictions disappear.
What analytics will and will not tell you
Google Analytics now counts the visits that click through from an assistant, and how to read them is just below. It cannot count the person who heard your name, closed the assistant and typed you into the address bar: that visit lands in Direct. Watch direct and branded search next to the AI line, and ask every new caller where they heard your name. That answer is worth more than the dashboard.
How to see ChatGPT and other AI referrals in GA4.
Since May 13, 2026, Google Analytics 4 sorts visits from AI assistants into a channel of their own, called AI Assistant, in its default channel group. Google names ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Copilot and Grok among the sources. You do not need us to read it. Four steps:
Open the traffic report
Go to Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition. The first column is the session's channel group. AI Assistant shows up as its own row once at least one visit has come in from an assistant in the dates you picked.
Split it by assistant
Switch the first column to Session source, or add it as a secondary dimension. Each assistant then gets its own line, so you can see whether ChatGPT or Copilot is the one sending people.
See which pages they cited
Add Landing page as a secondary dimension. A visit that arrives from an assistant came through a link in its answer, so the landing page tells you which of your pages it pointed to. Those are the pages to keep accurate first.
Count leads, not visits
Mark your form submission or booking as a key event, then read the key events column on the AI Assistant row. Twelve visits that turn into three calls matter more than three hundred that leave.
One of five places the answer can happen.
We split this work by where the customer's question gets answered, not by what the tactics are called. This page is the one furthest from Google: the assistants people open instead of a search engine. SEO is the foundation all five stand on, the technical, on-page and authority work that makes your pages findable in the first place. Answer engine optimization is Google quoting one of your pages directly on the results screen. AI search visibility is Google writing its own summary instead, in AI Overviews and AI Mode. And search experience optimization is everything after the click, whether the page someone lands on turns into a call.
They share inputs. The consistency and mention work described on this page also helps the Google surfaces, which is why we rarely sell it on its own and never sell it as a replacement for the basics.
What owners ask us about this.
What is generative engine optimization, in plain English?
Assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and the Gemini app answer a question by naming two or three businesses instead of listing a page of links. Generative engine optimization is the work that makes your business one of those names. Most of it happens away from your website, on the listings, profiles, rosters and articles a model can find and cross-check.
Is AI SEO the same thing as GEO and AEO?
They are three names for overlapping work, and we sell all three. We split them by where the answer shows up: this page for the assistants outside Google, answer engine optimization for the boxes where Google quotes one page, and AI search optimization for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Buy them as one plan and the listing and page work is done once, not three times.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend my business?
Nobody can, least of all the people selling the guarantee. The companies running these models do not publish how the names get picked, the answers drift week to week, and two people asking the same thing in the same city can get different businesses back. What is within reach is making you easy to find, easy to describe and easy to check, then measuring whether the answers move. Treat a promised placement as a reason to walk, or at the very least to ask for it in the contract with a refund attached.
How is this different from the AI work on your other page?
It is a different place, not a different idea. AI search visibility covers Google's own generative answers, AI Overviews and AI Mode, which appear on the search results page and lean on Google's index. This page covers the assistants outside Google: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and the Gemini app. They read different sources and are measured differently, so we run them as two jobs that share one foundation.
Do I need a special file or page so the AI can read my site?
No. There is a steady supply of products promising a magic file that makes models prefer you. Google has said publicly that things like llms.txt are not required, and the assistants outside Google have not asked for one either. What actually moves this is dull: facts that match everywhere, real mentions on sites you do not own, pages that answer the question, and being properly indexed in the search engines the assistants lean on, Bing included.
How long before anything changes?
Corrections land fastest, because you are fixing something already wrong in public rather than building something new, and those can show inside a few weeks. Mentions and citations move slower, usually a quarter or two before the answers shift, and longer in a category full of established names. We would rather read what the web currently says about you and hand you a range than name a date on a first call.
We are an agency. Can you run this under our brand?
Yes. Agencies use us for fulfillment today and this goes out the same way: your brand on the report, your client relationship, our team running the prompt list, the listing corrections and the mention work. The partner page covers how a first client gets started.
See what the assistants say about you today.
Tell us your business name, your city and what you do. We will ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and the Gemini app the questions your customers would ask, and send you what came back, including the answers you will not enjoy reading.
- A free consult. A real conversation about your business, your area and what is not working yet.
- An honest evaluation. Where you stand in search, ads and follow-up next to the businesses you lose customers to.
- A plan you keep. What we would fix first and why. It is yours whether or not you work with us.
Form not loading? Email hello@beyaoshy.com and we will reply within one business day.