AI search visibility
How to get AEO and GEO clients: what AI answers cite, measured
To get AEO and GEO clients, sell what AI answers quote: in a Leadity study of 19 answers on lead data, 84% of quoted cost passages carried a number. Start where the gap is plain, such as remodelers: 42.3% of their Google Maps listings showed no website in Q3 2026. Sell audits and work, never a guaranteed citation.
In plain words: AEO and GEO are two names for one service, making a business's pages easy for AI answers to find, quote and cite.
By the Leadity team Updated 20 October 2026 11 min read 7 sources How we work
On this page
84%
of the passages AI answers quoted on cost questions about Google Maps lead data carried a number with a unit (31 of 37, Leadity study, October 2026)
What do AI answers actually cite?
What the 52 pages AI search answers cited had in common, and what to check in a client's pages
| Pattern on the cited page | Share of the 52 pages | What to check in an audit |
|---|---|---|
| A visible date | 73% | Undated pages, or dates that never change |
| 1,500 words or more of main content | 63% | Service pages of a few lines |
| A table | 56% | Prices, areas and specs buried in paragraphs |
| A named person as author in the schema | 50% | No owner or expert named anywhere |
| An FAQ section | 50% | Customer questions left unanswered |
| The answer in the first sentence | 40% | Openings that warm up before they answer |
| FAQPage schema | 21% | Schema sold as the fix: it is not what sets cited pages apart |
A Leadity study of 52 pages cited by AI search answers for 19 buyer questions about Google Maps lead data, read 14 October 2026. It shows what cited pages share, not what caused the citation. More numbers: AI search statistics.
Source Leadity
What do AI answers quote from those pages?
Pages cited by AI answers ran a median 2,161 words in a Leadity study of 52 cited pages, October 2026. Our reading: length came with sections, tables and figures, not padding.
Numbers with units get quoted. In Leadity's October 2026 study, 84% of passages AI answers quoted on cost questions carried a number with a unit.
What this means for your client: put real numbers with units on their pages, such as a price per visit or the towns they serve.
Vendor pages get discounted. 14 of the 19 answers told readers to weigh vendor-written sources with care, and kept the verdicts tied to a number or a stated limit.
Being good is not being found. Leadity's own site appeared in 0 of 178 search results behind those answers in October 2026. Our reading: being retrieved comes before page structure.
Our interpretation, not a measured result: a client's pages earn quotes with facts only that business has, such as its prices, service towns and job counts, not general tips anyone could write.
Source Leadity
What are AEO and GEO?
AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) are two names for one service: making a business's pages easy for AI answers to find, quote and cite.
GEO comes from a 2023 research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues, and Google's own guide calls the work SEO: optimizing for generative AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."
Which businesses are the easiest AEO and GEO prospects?
General contractors' Google Maps listings show no website 42.5% of the time, and remodelers' 42.3%, in Leadity's Q3 2026 Google Maps data. Those businesses are the first-site pool.
Those are listing statistics: they measure the website field on Google Maps, and some of those businesses post a site somewhere else. The full no-website ranking of 32 trades is in how to get web design clients.
For the audit, landscapers give the biggest pool: about 18.1 listings with a website per ZIP search, then plumbers (17.0) and roofers (16.5). The pool is a calculation (businesses per ZIP search times the share with a website), not a count.
Our interpretation: a business with no site has no page of its own for an AI answer to quote, so the first deliverable is a site built to be quoted. A business with a site is the second pool, for the audit.
Source Leadity
Which trades give you the most websites to audit?
The 14 trades with 50,000 or more businesses, ranked by the listings with a website one ZIP search returns (calculated)
| Trade | Businesses | No website on the listing | Businesses per ZIP search | With a website per ZIP search, calculated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Landscapers | 79,000 | 36.2% | 28.3 | 18.1 |
| Plumbers | 57,249 | 31.5% | 24.8 | 17.0 |
| Roofing contractors | 319,184 | 29.9% | 23.6 | 16.5 |
| HVAC contractors | 116,512 | 32.0% | 22.3 | 15.2 |
| Painters | 76,113 | 41.1% | 25.6 | 15.1 |
| Deck builders | 332,287 | 25.3% | 16.6 | 12.4 |
| Concrete contractors | 132,775 | 36.4% | 19.4 | 12.3 |
| Kitchen remodelers | 374,587 | 28.6% | 17.2 | 12.3 |
| Bathroom remodelers | 425,907 | 34.2% | 18.4 | 12.1 |
| Remodelers | 220,094 | 42.3% | 19.5 | 11.3 |
| General contractors | 143,710 | 42.5% | 19.5 | 11.2 |
| Flooring contractors | 151,120 | 36.0% | 17.2 | 11.0 |
| Fence contractors | 99,301 | 28.9% | 13.9 | 9.9 |
| Swimming pool contractors | 54,544 | 24.0% | 12.8 | 9.7 |
Leadity's Q3 2026 Google Maps data, read 20 October 2026. The 2,241,697 businesses in 32 trades were found by Leadity customer scrapes from 1 July to 30 September 2026. Test accounts are excluded, and each business counts once per trade. Customers chose what to scrape, so the data is not a census. With a website per ZIP search is businesses per ZIP search times (100% minus the no-website share): a calculation, not a count. Method: how we measure our data.
Source Leadity
| Item | Value (per search) |
|---|---|
| Landscapers | 18.1 per search |
| Plumbers | 17.0 per search |
| Roofing contractors | 16.5 per search |
| HVAC contractors | 15.2 per search |
| Painters | 15.1 per search |
| Deck builders | 12.4 per search |
| Concrete contractors | 12.3 per search |
| Kitchen remodelers | 12.3 per search |
| Bathroom remodelers | 12.1 per search |
| Remodelers | 11.3 per search |
| General contractors | 11.2 per search |
| Flooring contractors | 11.0 per search |
| Fence contractors | 9.9 per search |
| Swimming pool contractors | 9.7 per search |
Calculated, not measured: Google Maps listings with a website to expect in one ZIP search, the 14 trades with 50,000 or more businesses. Leadity's Q3 2026 Google Maps data (1 July to 30 September 2026)
Source Leadity
How do you find AEO clients by trade and area?
Pick one trade from the tables
A high no-website share gives you the plainest gap to show. A big pool of listings with a website gives you the most audits to sell.
Pick one area you can serve
One state or a few towns. In Ohio, 49.9% of 9,300 general contractors showed no website on their listing, in Leadity's Q3 2026 Google Maps data.
Split the list in two
No website: pitch a first site built to be quoted. A website: pitch the audit.
Ask an AI engine before you call
Ask for the trade in their town and note who gets named. That answer opens the call.
Tip: Ask logged out, and more than once: answers change from run to run.
Call the owner, then follow up once
Send the findings in one short email with your name and postal address. Stop when they say stop.
Source Leadity
New order Scraped live when you order
- Trade
- General contractors
- Area
- Ohio
Filters Credits a lead
- Carrier-verified mobile (off) +0.8
- No website (on) +1
- Owner name (off) +2.5
- Email only (off) +0.8
- Verified email (off) +1.3
- Niche match (off) +0.5
Each lead costs
1.2 credits
0.2 base + 1 no website
From $0.0112 a lead
"From" is the price on the biggest plan. A smaller plan pays more per credit.
300 credits buy 250 of these leads
A lead that fails a filter is never billed
Pull general contractors in Ohio with no website posted anywhere: 300 free credits cover 428 no-website leads.
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Why would a business pay for AI search optimization?
Because AI summaries change who gets the click. Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025: 18% of their Google searches produced an AI summary.
With a summary on the page, they clicked a regular result in 8% of visits, against 15% without one.
Gartner predicted in February 2024 that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026. That is a forecast, not a measurement, so quote it as one.
Sources Pew Research Center Gartner
What can you promise an AEO client?
Work, measurement and honest odds, never a citation. Google says indexing and serving aren't guaranteed, and that to be eligible for AI Overviews or AI Mode a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet, with no extra technical requirements.
The best lab evidence is the GEO paper: edits such as adding statistics and citing sources raised visibility by up to 40%, and keyword stuffing did 10% worse than no edit on Perplexity.
Lower-ranked sites gained most: citing sources lifted the fifth-ranked site's visibility by 115.1%. Those are lab results on 2023-era engines, not a forecast for one client.
No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems.
What to promise and what to leave out
What works
- A dated audit of how AI answers treat the business today
- Named fixes: pages rewritten answer first, with the owner's own numbers
- The same questions re-run every month, with the results
- The basics checked: indexed, eligible for a snippet, crawlable
What to watch
- A citation, a position or a rank in ChatGPT
- Traffic from citations: Pew saw links inside AI summaries clicked in 1% of visits
- An llms.txt file as the fix: Google says its Search ignores such files
- Bought mentions: Google says inauthentic mentions help less than they seem
How do you run an AEO audit a prospect will pay for?
Write the buyer's questions
Ten to twenty questions a customer would ask, with the trade and the town: who fixes roofs in Dayton, what a repair costs, who answers at night.
Ask each engine several times, logged out
ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude. Count how often the business is named, not one position.
Record who gets cited instead
Rivals, directories, review sites. Note the page and the sentence each answer used.
Check the pages against the cited pattern
Answer in the first sentence, the owner's numbers with units, a table for prices and areas, a real date.
Hand over three named fixes
The page, the sentence, the number to add. The findings are the pitch for the monthly work.
Which facts should a client's pages carry?
- Prices with units: per square foot, per visit, the call-out fee
- Service towns in a table, with the response times they keep
- Counts from their own records: jobs done, years licensed, warranty length
- Stated limits: the jobs they do not take, the permits they handle
- A real date on each page, changed only when the page changes
What should an AEO package include, and how do you price it?
Four packages that match the two prospect pools
| Package | What is in it | How to price it |
|---|---|---|
| Audit | The question set, results per engine, three named fixes | One fixed fee, credited to the first month |
| First site | For a business with no website: one fast page that answers first, plus a complete Google Business Profile | One fixed price |
| Fix sprint | Key pages rewritten: answer first, the owner's numbers, tables, real dates | Per page, quoted up front |
| Monthly | The questions re-run, one new page of the owner's own data, a short report | A retainer the client can cancel any month |
We found no independent survey of AEO prices; the ranges in vendor guides are their own suggestions. Price on your hours and your market.
What mistakes lose AEO clients?
- Guaranteeing a citation. Google says indexing and serving aren't guaranteed.
- Reporting one run as a rank. Answers change from run to run.
- Selling FAQ schema as the fix. Only 21% of the cited pages in Leadity's study carried it. Leadity
- A page for every phrasing of a question. Google calls that scaled content abuse when it is done to manipulate AI responses.
- Generic tips. Google warns against recycling what others have already said.
Sources Leadity Google Search Central
Questions people ask
What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
In practice there is none worth billing for. AEO, answer engine optimization, and GEO, generative engine optimization, both mean making pages easy for AI answers to find, quote and cite. GEO comes from a 2023 research paper, and Google's own guide says optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO.
Can you guarantee a client will be cited by ChatGPT or Google AI?
Nobody can guarantee a citation: Google says no third-party tool has access to its ranking or AI systems, and that indexing and serving aren't guaranteed. You can promise a dated audit, named fixes and monthly measurement. In lab tests, the GEO paper found edits raised visibility by up to 40%, which is evidence, not a promise.
Which businesses need AEO services most?
Businesses whose customers ask AI about their trade and hear a rival's name. The plainest gap is no website. According to Leadity's Q3 2026 Google Maps data (1 July to 30 September 2026), 42.3% of 220,094 remodelers showed none on their Google Maps listing. Businesses with thin service pages are the second pool, for an audit.
What should a client page give AI answers to quote?
Numbers with units, above all. In Leadity's October 2026 study of AI answers about Google Maps lead tools, 31 of 37 passages quoted on cost questions carried one, and 56% of the 52 cited pages had a table. Generic tips anyone could write give an answer little to lift. The figures: AI search statistics.
How much should you charge for AEO or GEO work?
We found no independent survey of AEO prices, only vendor suggestions. Price a fixed audit you can deliver in a day or two and credit it to the first month. Then sell a monthly retainer scoped by the questions you track and the pages you fix, priced on your hours and your local market.
Sources
Where the figures on this page come from, with the date we read each one.
- Leadity Cited pages study: 52 pages AI search answers cited for 19 buyer questions about Google Maps lead data (read 14 October 2026) Read 15 October 2026
- Leadity Leadity's Q3 2026 Google Maps data (1 July to 30 September 2026) Read 20 October 2026
- Google Search Central AI features and your website Read 15 October 2026
- Google Search Central Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features on Google Search Read 15 October 2026
- arXiv (KDD 2024) GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, Aggarwal et al., arXiv 2311.09735 Read 15 October 2026
- Pew Research Center Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results (22 July 2025) Read 15 October 2026
- Gartner Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026, Due to AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents (19 February 2024) Read 15 October 2026
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