Showing Up in AI Answers Takes Work on Three Fronts, and Most Owners Still Do One

Buyers used to type a few keywords into Google and pick from what ranked. Now they ask an assistant a full question and get a short list of recommended names back. That change has quietly rewritten what it takes to get found, and most business owners are still paying someone to optimize for the old way. Getting recommended by AI takes coordinated work on three fronts at once, and the operators winning at it have stopped treating it as a bigger version of SEO.

Chuck Chiodo is the AI Marketing Systems Architect and CEO of the digital marketing agency First Contact Marketing, and a Marine Corps veteran with more than 25 years in the field. He works with owners on both halves of the AI-era problem: getting cited when a prospect asks an assistant a question, and responding fast enough to convert the lead once it comes in. His read is that the shift in how people search has outrun how most businesses are optimizing for it.

That gap between how buyers search and how brands are built for it is his whole pitch. "The big mistake people are making is they're still optimizing for traditional SEO, and that's not working," says Chiodo. Doing one piece of the job well, he argues, no longer moves the needle when the systems doing the recommending are reading for something else entirely.

The demo that lands the point

Rather than open with technical jargon that makes an owner's eyes glaze over, Chiodo runs a live test. On a Zoom call he has the prospect type three questions their own customers commonly ask into an AI tool, then they watch the results together. Recognized competitors get named; the prospect's own business doesn't appear. "Do you recognize those competitors? So you're not in any of the recommendations. How do you feel about that?" says Chiodo, letting the absence make the argument for him.

The move works because it takes his opinion out of it. Most owners, seeing legitimate competitors surface while they're nowhere, decide they do care about the gap, and the rare few getting enough referral business to shrug it off screen themselves out early. "Don't take my word for it, do it yourself," says Chiodo, who treats the demo as the first step before any conversation about showing up in AI results, because a problem an owner watches happen is one they'll actually move to fix.

Three fronts, not one

What it takes to close that gap runs across three areas that have to work together. There's on-page schema, the behind-the-scenes code on a site; there's content formatted specifically so a machine can parse it; and there's off-site presence in high-authority places. Owners tend to invest in one and assume they're covered. "It's really you have to have everything," says Chiodo, who sees traditional SEO firms still chasing rankings the old way or fixating on schema alone while the rest goes untended.

He reframes what each piece is even for. A backlink, in his account, isn't valuable for the link itself but for putting consistent, relevant information in a credible location tied to the questions people are asking, closer to earned authority off-site than a link-count metric. Publishing content isn't enough on its own either, since a blog post without the right schema and metadata won't be read properly by an AI overview or an assistant, which makes it content the machines skip no matter how much of it a brand pushes out.

The gaps owners can't see

The costliest gaps, in Chiodo's telling, are the ones owners don't know exist. An older WordPress site often lacks the technical files the language models actually read, things like a properly configured robots file and the newer LLM-focused files, and without them the systems interpret the site poorly. "They think, oh, I've had an SEO guy for a while," says Chiodo, "but your traffic is probably decreasing, and you're not being cited by the places people are searching." The owner assumes coverage while the machines quietly can't read the site.

The other blind spots sit off the page. Google Business Profile has become a source of truth and authority that matters more than it used to for many businesses, and off-site content only helps when it's formatted the way an AI can consume rather than scattered around at random, an unmaintained foundation that undercuts everything built on it. Most owners are focused on one of these fronts without seeing the full picture, which he calls the biggest challenge in the space right now.

Speed to lead, without the mask

On the conversion side, Chiodo has spent years building fast-response systems, and the shift to conversational AI is what made them work. Older static automations would march through a script even when a prospect's answer had nothing to do with the question, as long as some answer was given. A properly trained conversational agent can catch that, ask for clarification, and actually qualify the person. "When somebody gives an answer that isn't relevant, you can call them out on it and get that clarification," says Chiodo, so the system collects real information instead of nonsense.

The payoff is a pipeline that responds in seconds, qualifies the lead, and books the appointment, which he notes solves the follow-up problem plaguing most paid-ad spend, where owners fail to follow up fast enough or often enough. That lets a sales team spend its time on qualified prospects rather than tire-kickers, and it ties the spend to outcomes an owner can measure. The velocity only compounds the earlier problem for anyone still invisible in AI results, since faster conversion does nothing for leads that never arrive.

Never pretend it's a person

The rule Chiodo holds to across all of it is transparency about what's a bot. He's been building messenger automations since 2017, back before AI, when plenty of operators tried to pass their bots off as human and left people feeling deceived once they found out. His practice has always been to say plainly that it's an AI assistant up front. "The key to success is don't try to pretend," says Chiodo, who finds opt-in rates climb significantly when people know they aren't being fooled.

That honesty is built into the automations themselves. Every one includes a human handoff, so a prospect who asks to speak with a person gets connected rather than trapped in a loop. "If they say I just want to talk to a human, we say no problem, let me get you connected to someone on our team," says Chiodo. Keeping that door open is what preserves the trust the conversation depends on, and it's the same instinct behind the whole approach: let people see clearly what they're dealing with, whether it's a bot answering a message or the fact that they've gone missing from the recommendations their competitors show up in.