A growing share of your customers no longer scroll Google results — they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI a question and take the answer. Those answers name specific businesses. AI search optimization is the work of making yours one of them, and almost nobody in the Hudson Valley is doing it yet.
When someone asks an AI assistant “who should I call for a bathroom remodel near New Paltz?”, the AI doesn’t answer from memory. It runs a live search, reads the pages and profiles it finds, and writes an answer naming a handful of businesses it could read, understand, and verify. That process decides everything.
To be one of the businesses named, you need to clear six bars. Your site has to be readable — the actual content visible in plain HTML, not buried behind scripts. It has to be structured — clear headings and accurate schema markup a machine can parse. You have to be verifiable — the same name, phone, and service area everywhere the AI looks, from your website to your Google Business Profile to the directories. Your pages have to be substantial — a real page per service, not one thin paragraph listing everything. You have to look trustworthy — real reviews, real photos, a real person behind the business. And your pages should be answer-first — leading with what you do and where, not burying it under a brand story.
Every piece of AI search work we do is one of those six things. There’s no secret beyond doing them properly — which is exactly why so few businesses clear the bar.
Adoption is moving faster than businesses are. BrightLocal found 45% of consumers used AI to find a local business in the past year — seven times the share from a year earlier. Meanwhile SOCi’s study of over 350,000 locations found only about 1.2% of local businesses are being surfaced by ChatGPT at all.
We ask the AI tools the questions your customers ask — “best [your trade] in [your town]” and a dozen variants — and record who gets named. If it’s not you, we find out why. This is part of every free audit.
We make sure your real content is in the HTML where crawlers can read it, that AI crawlers aren’t blocked, and that the site is fast enough to get fully crawled. If your platform makes that impossible, we tell you straight.
Accurate schema markup for your business and services, answer-first page structure, and one consistent identity across your site, Google Business Profile, and the directories AI cross-references.
Pages and content based on your actual work — real jobs, real photos, real first-hand knowledge. That’s what AI cites, because it can’t get it anywhere else. Generic filler articles get skipped.
AI search has spawned a wave of agencies selling “AEO” and “GEO” packages as a mysterious new discipline at a markup. Most of it is repackaged fundamentals — and some of it is junk.
Google has said directly that ranking well in AI results uses the same systems as regular search — there is no separate trick. So we won’t sell you an “llms.txt file” (no measurable benefit), we won’t “rewrite your content for AI” into chunked robot-speak (Google’s own search team has rejected that advice), and we won’t guarantee you a spot in any AI answer — no one honestly can.
What we do is make your business genuinely readable, verifiable, and worth citing — work that helps you in Google search and AI search at the same time, because they’re the same underlying game.
AI search optimization is included in our Grow plan at $900/month, alongside Google Business Profile management, reviews, and monthly local content — because the pieces only work together. Businesses covering many towns step up to Lead at $1,600/month. Published pricing, no contracts, cancel anytime.
Full plan breakdowns are on the Local & AI Search page. And if you’re starting from a site that can’t be read at all, the honest first step may be a rebuild on a readable foundation — we’ll tell you which situation you’re in.