Getting Your Business Mentioned by ChatGPT and Google's AI — Without the Snake Oil

Start with what is not known

Search for AEO or GEO advice and you will find hundreds of confident guides with numbered tactics and impressive percentages.

Almost none of them disclose a methodology.

The claims circulating that AI-referred traffic converts four, eleven, or twenty-three times better than search traffic all trace back to vendor blogs with no stated sample size and no stated method. They cannot all be true and there is no way to check any of them.

This matters because agencies are already selling expensive AEO packages built on those numbers. If someone quotes you a conversion multiple for AI traffic, ask for the study. You will not get one.

What follows is reasoned practice based on what is actually documented. It is not a guaranteed method, and anyone offering you one is selling confidence they do not have.

What is actually documented

Three things, all primary-sourced:

• AI summaries reduce clicks on informational queries. Pew found 8% click-through with a summary against 15% without — a finding Google disputes on methodology. Ahrefs independently found a 34.5% average CTR reduction where AI Overviews appear.
• Clicks from inside summaries are rare — about 1% of visits in the Pew data. Being cited is mostly a visibility benefit, not a traffic one.
• Conversational queries are roughly three times longer than typed search queries, per Google. People ask complete questions.

That is close to the entirety of the solid ground. Everything else is inference.

What follows logically

If a system generates an answer by reading pages and citing some of them, then being citable means being quotable, specific, and attributable. That reasoning is sound even though the mechanism is not published.

Which suggests:

• Write a direct answer in the first two sentences under each heading. A model extracting an answer takes what is extractable.
• Publish real numbers. "₹15,000 to ₹25,000 a month" can be cited. "Affordable packages" cannot. This is the single biggest differentiator and almost no Indian agency does it, because they do not want to publish prices.
• Use question-shaped headings that match how people actually ask.
• Say who wrote it, with real credentials and a real history. Attribution is what makes a source worth citing.
• Keep facts current and dated. Stale numbers get superseded by someone else's fresh ones.
• Be consistent across the web — your site, your Google Business Profile, your directory listings. Contradictory information about your own business makes you a weak source.

What to ignore

• Any specific conversion multiple for AI traffic. No methodology exists for any of them.
• "Guaranteed citation" services. Nobody controls what a model cites.
• Tools promising to measure your "AI visibility score". They are sampling prompts and reporting the result as a metric. It is not stable and it is not comparable.
• Rewriting your whole site "for LLMs". The advice that is actually defensible — answer clearly, be specific, be attributable — is the same advice that was right for humans.

The India angle that is genuinely underserved

Here is where this gets interesting for a Tamil Nadu business, and it is primary-sourced.

Google's AI Mode now supports Tamil, along with seven other Indian languages. Google states that India is its largest global user base for both voice and visual search. Search Live launched in India before anywhere else outside the US.

So the largest voice-search market on earth is now asking long conversational questions in Tamil — and the amount of good Tamil business content on the web is small.

If you sell to Tamil-speaking consumers, writing honest, specific, question-shaped content in Tamil is probably the highest-leverage content work available to you right now. Not because of a proven AEO formula, but because the competition has not arrived.

The uncomfortable conclusion

Good AEO looks almost exactly like good content.

Answer the question. Be specific. Use real numbers. Say who you are. Keep it current.

There is no separate discipline here yet — only a new reason to do properly what most businesses never did in the first place.

In two years there will be real data and real methods. Until then, anyone charging a premium for AEO is charging you for writing, with a better name on the invoice.

Related reading

• Google now answers in Tamil
• How worried should you be about AI Overviews?
• 7 questions to ask an agency before you pay