Is your SME invisible to ChatGPT? A practical guide to AEO
More and more customers ask AI assistants instead of Google. If your company can't be read by AI, you don't exist for them. Here's where to start.
Try this: ask ChatGPT who the best suppliers in your industry are in your area. If your company doesn't come up, you have a problem traditional SEO won't fix: you are invisible to AI assistants.
The shift happening now
A growing share of searches no longer goes through Google: it goes through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and the assistants built into every device. These AIs don't read your brochures: they read structured content, open data and authoritative sources. If you're not there, you don't get recommended.
It's called AEO — Answer Engine Optimization: being found not by those who search, but by those who ask.
Where to start (without turning everything upside down)
- Content that answers real questions. AIs cite those who explain well: a page answering "how much does a custom ERP cost?" is worth more than ten slogans.
- Structured data. Schema.org, FAQ markup, consistent company information (name, location, services) everywhere.
- Sources that talk about you. Industry directories, trade fairs (for us, WMF 2026), press: AIs weigh external citations.
- Channels AIs can actually use. A chatbot on your site trained on your data, or an MCP server exposing your catalog: you go from readable to queryable.
The video
We covered this in a video on our channel: "Is your SME invisible to ChatGPT? Here's how to fix it" — you'll find it in the What they say about us section.
The first step
AEO is not a one-off campaign: it's making your company readable by the machines your customers already use. Get in touch and we'll tell you, concretely, how visible you are today and what to fix first.