Thanks to everyone who joined this week’s workshop on getting your business found in AI search. Below is a full walkthrough for anyone who couldn’t make it live, plus the tools and tactics we’re using ourselves at Emarketed.
We’ve been doing SEO for over 20 years and digital marketing since 1998. AI search is the next big shift, and traffic from ChatGPT and other AI tools keeps climbing. So that’s where a lot of our optimization work is going right now, both for clients and for our own site.
How AI Models Decide What to Recommend
The first thing I tell every business owner: go look yourself up. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google’s AI Overview, and Copilot. Type in your services. See who shows up.
I ran “best AEO agencies in Los Angeles” in ChatGPT a week before the workshop. Emarketed wasn’t on the list. Some bigger competitors were, and that’s not by accident. They’ve either done the optimization work or they get mentioned in the press constantly. Either way, that’s the bar.
Most AI overviews now show their sources. That’s a gift. Click through them. See where the citations are coming from. In my LA AEO search, the cited sources included LinkedIn articles, Siege Media, and a few “top AEO agencies” listicles. Those are the spots to target.
Get Yourself Cited
LinkedIn is one of the easiest places to start. Anybody can publish an article there. Write a “10 best [your industry]” piece. Make it actually good. Include yourself, but include your peers and competitors too. Thin self-promotional content gets ignored by both readers and AI models.
When I asked ChatGPT directly about Emarketed, it knew us. It had our founding details, who runs the company, and the services we offer including AEO and AI visibility. That didn’t happen by accident either. Over the past year we’ve been actively training models, building citations, and getting mentioned in the right places.
A tool we use for tracking this is SEMrush. You can plug in a company and see where they’re being cited across the web, what prompts trigger their mention in AI tools, and which sites are pulling them in. We’re also building something similar internally.
Build a Tool, Not Just Content
One of the strategies that’s worked for us: build free industry tools.
A few months back we launched a topic authority builder. It’s a free tool on emarketed.com where you put in your brand and some keywords, and it tells you what to write. That tool is now getting cited on other sites, which trains AI models, which sends us traffic.
We’ve got 10 or 11 free tools on the site now. They’re all open, no email required to use them. People can run a report and optionally send it to themselves if they want. We’re seeing referral traffic from sites that link to these tools, and those backlinks help with both traditional SEO and AI citations.
If you can build something useful for your industry, do it. A calculator, a checklist generator, an audit tool, anything that gives someone real value. It pulls in links, it pulls in traffic, and it gets your brand mentioned in AI results.
Train the Models Directly
We use a tool called Akii to automate AI model training. It sends questions to ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Search, and others, asking things like “summarize the key insights from emarketed.com” or “give me an expert analysis on what Emarketed does.”
You can do this manually too. Just go to each platform and run those queries yourself. AKII automates it so we can hit hundreds of variations across multiple models. We’ve run about 738 of these so far with another 262 in the queue.
What AI-Ready Content Looks Like
Start with a scan. Our most popular free tool is the AI visibility scanner on the homepage. Drop your URL in, and it’ll check schema markup, content structure, citation signals, E-E-A-T signals, technical SEO, and give you a score plus specific fixes.
Beyond the scan, here’s what AI-ready content looks like in practice:
Lead with the answer. Don’t bury what your page is about three scrolls down. The first paragraph should tell both humans and AI exactly what this page is and who it’s for. AI models don’t want to read your whole page to figure out the point. Make it easy.
Use questions in your headings. People ask AI questions, not keyword phrases. Structure your H2s and H3s as the questions your customers actually ask, then answer them directly underneath.
Add FAQs to every key page. Not the same generic FAQ block copy-pasted across the site. Custom questions for each page, written for the actual visitor on that page. FAQs help users, and they’re a goldmine for AI models scanning for direct answers.
Connect Google Search Console
If your site isn’t connected to Google Search Console, fix that today. It’s free, it takes a few minutes to verify ownership, and it gives you data you can’t get anywhere else.
What you get: impressions, click-through rate, average position, the queries people are using to find you, which pages are performing, site map status, video performance, and alerts if Google penalizes you. We started getting more aggressive with our own AEO work around mid-November last year, and Search Console is how we tracked the results month over month. The numbers have been climbing since.
I could do a whole separate workshop just on Search Console features. There’s that much in there.
What “Lack of Technical Clarity” Looks Like
This is the most common problem I see on client sites:
- No clear “who we are, what we do” statement on key pages
- Missing or incomplete business info across the web
- No structured data or schema markup
- Content that buries the answer instead of leading with it
Schema markup is code you add to your pages that tells search engines and AI models what type of content is on the page. Blog post, FAQ, review, product, event, organization. Each type has its own schema. Adding it doesn’t change how the page looks to visitors, but it gives AI tools a clean structured way to understand what they’re looking at.
Quick Wins You Can Do Today
Right after this workshop, here’s what I’d tackle:
- Update your homepage intro to directly state what you do and who you serve.
- Add custom FAQs to all key service pages, including the homepage.
- Confirm you have a Google Business Profile and that it’s current.
- Add basic schema markup to your main pages.
- Connect your site to Google Search Console.
- Run your site through the free AI tools at emarketed.com/tools and hand the results to your developer or agency.
- Start asking AI platforms questions about your company and services to see what they know.
- Look at the sources cited in AI answers for your industry, and target those for placement.
- Write a “10 best [your industry]” article on LinkedIn.
- Start a YouTube channel with short or long-form videos about your industry topics.
Wrapping Up
The companies showing up in AI search a year from now are the ones doing this work today. It’s a mix of old-school SEO fundamentals, newer AEO tactics, and a willingness to publish useful stuff that gets cited.
If you want help running an audit on your site or putting any of this into action, reach out. And check out the free tools at emarketed.com while you’re there. Most of what we covered today, you can run yourself in an afternoon.
Thanks again to everyone who showed up. See you at the next one.
Matt Ramage, Founder, Emarketed
