The New SEO: 8 Things to Do This Month So AI Search Can Find You

A member asked me last week why her competitor keeps showing up when people ask ChatGPT for a bookkeeper in her town, and she never does. Her site is nicer. Her reviews are better. She has been in business longer.

Here is what changed. People used to type three words into Google and scroll ten links. Now they type a full sentence into ChatGPT, Claude, or Google's AI overview and act on the two or three names that come back. Nobody scrolls. The answer either includes you or it does not.

The good news is that getting included is boring, cheap, and within your reach. I have trained more than 7,500 people on this, and the businesses that get picked up by AI are almost never the ones with the biggest budget. They are the ones who did eight unglamorous things and kept doing them. So that is this post: eight things across one month, two tasks a week. I do not write code, and I do all of this myself.

Why the old rulebook stopped working

Old SEO was a ranked list. Ten results, and your job was to be near the top. AI search does not produce a list. It produces a paragraph, and a paragraph has room for maybe three businesses. So the prize got smaller, and the thing that wins it changed. What wins now is being the clearest, most quotable source in your category. A page full of "innovative solutions" is unquotable. A page that says exactly what you do, for whom, and where is a gift to a summarizer. You cannot outspend a national chain on ads. You can absolutely out-clarify one.

Week one: make yourself readable

1. Rewrite your homepage first sentence so a stranger could repeat it

Open your homepage and find the first real sentence. Read it out loud. If a neighbor could not repeat it back accurately, an AI cannot either. You want three concrete things: what you do, who it is for, and where. "We are a residential HVAC company in Fort Collins serving homeowners in older houses with original ductwork." That is quotable. "We bring comfort home" is not.

Paste your homepage copy into Claude and ask: "Tell me in one sentence what this business does, who it serves, and where. If you cannot tell from the page, list exactly what is missing." That list is your assignment. Then fix the same sentence everywhere else it lives: Google Business Profile, Instagram bio, LinkedIn, email signature. Consistency is a big part of how an AI decides it is confident enough to name you.

2. Turn your five most-asked questions into five real pages

This is the highest-return item on the list, and almost nobody does it.

Write down the five questions customers actually ask before they buy. Not the ones you wish they asked. "How much does a kitchen remodel cost in Denver." "Do you take my insurance." "What happens if I cancel." Give each one its own page, with the question as the headline and the answer in the first paragraph. Not setup. The answer, first, in plain language, with real numbers where you can give them.

This works because it matches what people actually type. Nobody types "HVAC Fort Collins" into Claude. They type "how much should I expect to pay to replace a furnace in an older Fort Collins home." If your page answers that sentence in that shape, you are the obvious thing to quote. You have answered each of these a hundred times on the phone, so talk it out, let Claude clean it up, and keep your own words.

Week two: make yourself machine-legible

3. Add FAQ and business schema to your site

This sounds technical and is not. Schema is hidden code that labels your content so machines do not have to guess. You need two kinds: business schema (name, address, phone, hours, service area) and FAQ schema (each question paired with its answer). On most site builders this is a plugin or a setting. Ask Claude to "write JSON-LD FAQPage schema for these five questions and answers, and LocalBusiness schema for this business," paste your details, drop the output into your builder's custom-code box, and run the page through Google's Rich Results Test. When an AI is choosing between two businesses that both look fine, labeled data is easier to trust.

4. Check that your site is actually readable to a crawler

A surprising number of beautiful websites are invisible. The words live inside images, or behind a script that never finishes, and nobody tells you. Three checks, no developer needed. Try to highlight the text on your key pages with your cursor. If you cannot, it is an image and it does not count. Load the page on a phone on cellular and time how long the main content takes to appear. And confirm new pages show up in your sitemap, because a page nobody knows to read does not get read. I learned that last one the hard way: my own sitemap quietly stopped updating for two weeks and everything I published in that window was invisible. The site looked perfect. Check the plumbing.

Week three: make yourself trustworthy

5. Get your business facts identical everywhere

Name, address, phone, hours, service area. Find every place they exist: Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, industry directories, your chamber listing, that conference page from three years ago. Make them match exactly, not approximately. "Suite 4" in one place and "Ste. 4" in another is the kind of tiny inconsistency that makes an automated system less confident about you, and less confidence means fewer mentions. Keep the list of listings you find. You will use it again next year.

6. Build a steady review habit instead of a review push

The pattern matters as much as the count. Forty reviews from one week in 2024 reads as a campaign. Three or four a month, every month, reads as a functioning business. Pick the natural moment when someone is happiest, right after the install or the results call or the delivery, and ask then. Every time, same script. Then reply to every review, including the rough ones. Your replies are text that machines read too, and a calm, specific reply to a complaint tells a very good story about you.

Week four: make yourself cited and tracked

7. Get named on sites that are not yours

Everything so far has been on your own property, and a business that only ever talks about itself is harder to trust than one other people describe.

You do not need press coverage. You need ordinary third-party mentions: a guest post on a partner's blog, a podcast episode, an association directory, a sponsorship listing for the youth team you already pay for. Aim for two this month. The ask is easier than you think, because you are offering something. "I would love to write a short piece for your readers on the three mistakes people make before hiring an electrician" is a favor, not a request.

8. Actually check whether it is working

This is the step everybody skips, and it is the one that keeps you sane. Write down the ten questions a perfect customer would ask before hiring you. Once a month, ask all ten in ChatGPT, Claude, and Google, and record which businesses get named. Put it in a spreadsheet with the date. That is your scoreboard.

You are looking for movement, not perfection. Did you appear for anything you did not last month? Did the AI describe you accurately, or get your services wrong, which tells you which page is unclear? Then check your analytics for referral traffic from AI tools. It is small at first and it is excellent traffic, because someone arriving on an AI's recommendation is already halfway to buying.

What to expect, honestly

Nothing here works overnight. The parts driven by live search can pick up changes within days to a few weeks once your pages are clear. The parts baked into a model's memory move much more slowly. So: some movement inside a month, real movement over a quarter, a compounding advantage after that. Which is why the calendar matters more than the intensity. Two tasks a week for four weeks beats one heroic weekend, because the heroic weekend never gets repeated and the habit does.

Notice too that every step here is the same instruction wearing a different hat. Say clearly what you do. Answer real questions directly. Label your information. Keep your facts consistent. Let other people vouch for you. Check your work. The machines just got better at rewarding clarity and worse at rewarding tricks, and clarity does not have a price tag.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to hire an SEO agency for this?

No. Every one of these eight steps is something you can do yourself with the tools you already have, plus an AI assistant to speed up the writing. Agencies mostly add value at scale. For a small business, your money goes further into writing the five question pages and building the review habit. Start yourself, and hire help later for the one piece you decide you hate.

Is traditional SEO dead now?

Not even close, and this is the relief nobody tells you. The work overlaps almost entirely. Clear pages, direct answers, fast loading, accurate business information, and other sites linking to you were good SEO ten years ago and they are good AI search practice today. What changed is the weighting: clarity now beats keyword placement, and being quotable beats being ranked. If you have been doing honest SEO, you are most of the way there.

How do I know if AI search is even sending me business?

Two places. Your analytics will show referral traffic from AI tools as its own source, usually small but high quality. And the simpler signal: ask new customers how they found you and listen for "I asked ChatGPT." That answer has gone from never to fairly common in about a year, and the conversations tend to run ahead of the numbers.

My business is brand new with no reviews and no mentions. Where do I start?

Steps 1 and 2, and nothing else for now. A crystal-clear description plus five pages answering the questions people actually ask will do more for a new business than anything else here, because you have no old mess to clean up. Specific beats established. An AI will happily recommend a small, clear, well-documented business over a vague one that has been around twenty years.

What if I do all eight and still do not show up?

Then you have something specific to diagnose instead of a general worry. It is usually one of three things: your pages answer questions in your language instead of your customer's, your competitors are better documented and you need more time, or something technical is blocking the crawler. Ask the AI directly what it knows about your business and your category. Its answer usually tells you which of the three you have.

Where to go from here

Put the four weeks on your calendar right now. Two tasks a week, an hour or two each. Not a project, not a rebrand, not a line item you have to justify. If you would rather not do it alone, this is exactly what we work through inside Club Jam on Skool. It is 47 dollars a month, there is a 7-day free trial, and there are 220+ modules covering the prompts, templates, and walkthroughs for this and a lot more. We have a 93 percent retention rate, which I mention only because it is the number I trust most about whether people are getting real value.

Come bring your homepage sentence and let us tear it apart together. That first sentence is where all of this starts, and it is a lot more fun to fix it with company. 🧡