What is AEO, and do you need an AEO agency in Ottawa?
AEO is answer engine optimization: getting your business named when someone asks an AI assistant, or Google’s AI Overview, the question they used to type into a search box. GEO, generative engine optimization, is the same thing under a different name.
Whether you need an agency for it has a short answer, and Google wrote most of it. Its documentation on AI features says “there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary”, and that “you don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features”. The precondition is that the page is indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. That is ordinary SEO.
So AEO is not a separate service. It is the SEO work done properly, plus one thing most sites skip: stating the facts assistants get asked for, in text, on your own domain. Both are below.
Updated 2026-08-28 · written from Ottawa
How an AI assistant decides who to name.
Assistants do not go and discover businesses. When a question has a local answer, they retrieve pages and repeat what those pages state: the directories, the map results and the review sites that already describe a business in plain, specific terms. Ask one what a service costs in your city and it will quote whichever page states a number.
That is why the business itself is so often missing from the answer. Most service sites say “contact us for a quote”, keep the service list in a PDF, and name nobody. A directory lists a starting price, a category and a town. The assistant has a specific answer on one page and a form on the other, and it quotes the page.
Google’s own advice for its AI features is the same advice it gives for ordinary search: make sure crawling is allowed, make content discoverable through internal links, keep it in textual form, support it with good images, keep the structured data accurate and the business information current. Nothing on that list is new, and nothing on it is a separate product.
The facts assistants are asked for
| Fact | Where it usually is | Where it belongs |
|---|---|---|
| A price, or a starting price | Behind a quote form | In text, on the service page |
| The list of services | In a PDF or an image | As a text list, one page per service |
| The area served | Implied by the address | Named towns and neighbourhoods, in text |
| Hours | On the Business Profile only | On the site and the profile, matching |
| A named person | Nowhere | On the about page and in the structured data |
A page that states these in text can be quoted. A form cannot.
Where AI search sits next to the map results.
Before spending on AI visibility, run the searches your customers actually run and look at what sits above the blue links. For most local service searches it is the map results, produced from Google Business Profiles rather than from websites. An AI Overview appears on some questions, more often the informational ones than the “who does this near me” ones.
If you are a plumber, a painter or a decorator, the thing to worry about first is usually the map, and that is the subject of our Maps guide. The good news is that the profile work and the AI work overlap almost completely: a complete, verified profile with accurate facts is exactly what an assistant retrieves when it looks for a local answer.
Two crawlers, two decisions
OpenAI documents its crawlers by name. OAI-SearchBot “surfaces websites in ChatGPT’s search features”, and “sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”. GPTBot is the separate training crawler. Blocking one does not block the other, and a robots.txt written before either existed usually blocks neither on purpose and both by accident.
Google’s controls are the ordinary ones: robots.txt for crawling, and the nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex directives for what is shown.
Three AEO checks, in this order.
Each one you can run yourself, in an afternoon, without buying a tool. The third can end in doing nothing, and none of the three verdicts is to hire an AEO agency.
Check one
Is the page indexed, with a snippet?
Google's stated precondition. Inspect the page in Search Console and read whether it is indexed and whether Google is showing a snippet for it. If it is not indexed, no AI feature will show it and nothing else on this list applies yet. The fix is crawling and internal links, which is ordinary SEO.
Check two
Do the AI crawlers receive your real page?
A site can allow every crawler in robots.txt and still hand them nothing, because a page built entirely in JavaScript is an empty shell to a crawler that does not run it. Fetch your own page from the command line with an AI user agent and read what comes back. If the prices, the FAQ and the service list are not in that response, they do not exist to the assistant.
Check three
Does your site state the facts people ask for?
An assistant asked what something costs, or who does it near me, needs a page that states a price, a service, an area and a person, in text, on your own domain. Most service sites say contact us for a quote and lose that answer to whichever directory lists a number. Write down, for your three most common customer questions, whether the literal answer appears on your site as text.
How to run check two
Request your own pricing page from the command line, once with a browser user agent and once with an AI crawler’s (the names are in OpenAI’s documentation, linked below). Compare the two responses. If the second one is a short document that carries your homepage’s title and none of your prices, your site is rendering its content in the browser and the crawler never sees it. That is a build problem, and it is more common than it should be on sites sold with an AI-visibility line.
Two verdicts are SEO, one is a build fix, and none is an AEO agency.
If a provider is quoting you a separate AEO line, ask which of these three it covers, and what the SEO line was for.
| You found | It means | Do this |
|---|---|---|
| The page is not indexed | Nothing downstream matters yet. | Fix crawling and internal links. This is SEO, and it is the whole job until it is done. |
| Indexed, but the crawlers get an empty shell | Your site is invisible to assistants however good the copy is. | A rendering fix on the site. It is a build problem, and no amount of content solves it. |
| Indexed, crawlable, and the facts are missing | Assistants are answering about you from someone else's page. | Publish the prices, services, areas and a named person, in text. The cheapest of the three, and the one most businesses skip. |
AEO and SEO are the same work, at one price.
The Hosting + SEO plan is $299 CAD a month, hosting included, and its own tagline reads “Get found on Google, Maps & AI search”. The AI half is not a surcharge because it is not separate work: it is the index check, the crawlable page, and the published facts, done once for both.
Our own robots.txt welcomes the named AI crawlers by user agent, and every price on this site is in the HTML. We make no claim about whether any assistant cites us today. The work itself is described on SEO in Ottawa, and the wider job on marketing in Ottawa.
What the three checks are, as work
- Getting every page indexed and eligible for a snippet, and keeping it there
- Serving the full page, prices and FAQ included, in the HTML every crawler receives
- Publishing the facts people ask assistants for: prices, services, areas, a named person
- Re-running the same customer questions against the assistants, and dating the result
The next questions people ask about AEO.
1Is AEO different from GEO?
Only in the name. AEO stands for answer engine optimization and GEO for generative engine optimization; both describe getting named in the answers AI assistants and Google's AI Overviews give. The work behind both is the same three checks on this page, and Google's documentation uses neither term. It says the requirement to appear in its AI features is to be indexed and eligible for a snippet, with no special markup.
2Do I need an llms.txt file?
Google says no. Its documentation states that you do not need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. We publish one on every site we build because it costs nothing and it is a convenient place to state prices and services in plain text. We make no claim that any assistant reads it, and you should distrust anyone who does without showing you how they know.
3Should I block GPTBot?
That is two decisions, and OpenAI documents them separately. GPTBot crawls content to train models. OAI-SearchBot is what surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features, and OpenAI states that a site opted out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Blocking the first does not affect the second. Decide what you think about training on its own; if you want to be found in ChatGPT's search, leave OAI-SearchBot allowed.
4How do I find out whether ChatGPT or Perplexity mentions my business?
Ask them, from a fresh session, the exact question a customer would ask, and write down every business and website named in the answer. Do it for three questions and two or three assistants, and date the result. If the answers come from directories rather than from businesses' own sites, that tells you which pages the assistants can read a specific answer from. Repeat it after you change something; that is the only way a change can be shown to have worked.
5Will AI Overviews take the clicks my website gets now?
Nobody can tell you that for your business, and we will not guess. What you can check for yourself is which features appear on the searches your customers run. For most local service searches the map results sit above the blue links, and an AI Overview appears on some questions and not others. For a local service business the map results are the thing to worry about first, and they are the subject of our Maps guide.
6Can you guarantee my business gets cited by an AI assistant?
No. Nobody outside the companies running these assistants controls what they cite, and their answers change between sessions. What we can do is run the three checks, show you a before reading, and re-run the same questions after. Anyone offering a guaranteed citation is offering something the documentation of every one of these engines says cannot be bought.
Every claim on this page about what an engine requires is quoted from that engine's own documentation, read on the date shown. Nothing on it is drawn from any client's account.
- Google Search Central, “AI features and your website”
Read 2026-08-28. Source of the no-special-requirements statements, the indexing precondition, the list of controls (robots.txt and the snippet directives), and the advice to keep content in textual form with accurate structured data.
- OpenAI, “Overview of OpenAI crawlers”
Read 2026-08-28. Source of the GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User user agents, what each is for, and the line that a site opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
Run the three AEO checks, then decide.
If you want them run against your site, call and Ana, our AI receptionist, will book it. Ask her a question about our prices first; she answers from the same published facts this page is arguing you should have.
The rest of the plain-English write-ups are in the guides.