Most firm owners I talk to have tried it at least once. They type the kind of question a prospect would ask into ChatGPT, read the answer, and look for their firm’s name. Often it isn’t there. Sometimes a competitor half their size is.
The groundwork for showing up at all is in AEO vs SEO: what professional services firms need to know. This post picks up where that one stops, at the moment an AI tool decides which firms to put in front of a prospect. It’s the AEO question I get asked most right now.
No AI company publishes exactly how its tool picks which firms to mention. What I can share is what I see when I test these tools for firms, and the patterns are steady enough to act on.
Run the test like a prospect would
Set aside an afternoon and write down eight to ten questions a prospect might ask before they know your firm exists. Make them specific, with the prospect’s industry and location. “Do I need a CPA who specializes in construction?” works. So does “What should a family business owner look for in an estate planning attorney near me?”
Run each one through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google. ChatGPT remembers what you’ve told it across chats, so opening a new chat won’t give you a clean result. Use a temporary chat or log out first. Write down where you’re testing from, too, since answers can change by location.
For every question, note which firms get named and which sources the answer cites. If your firm comes up, copy the exact words used to describe it.
When you read the results, your firm will usually land in one of three places.
- Not named at all. The tool couldn’t find enough about you to connect you to the question. The fix is getting your name onto more of the sites it reads, which is covered in “Get your firm onto the pages the tool already reads.”
- Named, but described wrong. An old specialty, or an office you moved out of years ago. Something it read is out of date. This one is usually a quick cleanup of old listings and profiles, and you’ll find it in that same section.
- Named for the wrong thing. You come up for general tax questions and disappear for the niche you actually want to grow. A page built for that specialty is usually what’s missing. See “Give the tool a page that matches the question.”
Each one calls for a different fix, so know which you’re dealing with before you change anything.
Pay closest attention to the sources
The firm names are what everyone looks at first. The sources are what tell you what to do next.
Perplexity lists its sources under every answer, and ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews usually link theirs too. Click through each one. When I do this for firms, the answer about which CPA or attorney to hire is often built from pages the named firms don’t own. A state society directory. A business journal’s list. A trade association’s member spotlight. A podcast episode page. A “how to choose” article on someone else’s site.
That tells you where the tool is reading for your specific question. If the same three or four sites keep coming up across your list, those are the ones to focus on.
Make a short list of every source that appears more than once. The next two sections are what to do with it.
Give the tool a page that matches the question
An AI tool answering a specific question looks for a specific page to point to. If a prospect asks about CPAs for construction companies and your site has one services page listing construction alongside eleven other industries, there’s very little for it to work with.
The firms I see named for a specialty usually have a page devoted to it. One page for each industry or client type you want to be known for, written for that client. It covers the problems they bring you, the questions they ask in the first meeting, what working together looks like, and a few anonymized examples of the work. Our Marketing for CPAs page is where we’re building ours.
Two or three of these pages is plenty to start. Pick the specialties you most want to grow, especially ones where your test came back “named for the wrong thing,” and build those first. Then link to each one from your homepage so it’s easy to find.
Get your firm onto the pages the tool already reads
Go back to your source list and ask one question about each site: how does a firm like mine end up on that page?
Some answers are quick. A directory listing you never claimed, or an association profile that still shows a specialty you dropped years ago. Fix those the same week.
Others take longer and tend to carry more weight:
- A quote or short expert piece in your local business journal
- A guest article or webinar for a trade association in your clients’ industry
- An episode on a podcast your clients already listen to
- An article co-written with a referral partner, like the banker or attorney you already send work to
The trade association is the one most firms skip, and it’s often the strongest. Picture a CPA firm that serves contractors writing one article for a contractors’ association newsletter. That page sits on a site an AI tool is likely to trust on construction questions, and it’s read by the exact people the firm wants to reach.
A good goal is one outside mention a month. Hit it, and by this time next year you’ll have twelve pages on sites these tools already read, each one tying your firm’s name to your specialty.
Run it again next quarter
None of this shows up overnight. Outside mentions build slowly, and AI tools take time to pick up what’s changed about your firm. A quarter is a fair gap between tests.
Save your question list and your source list. Put a date on the calendar three months out, run the same questions the same way, and compare the results to your first round.
The firms that get named in AI answers are the ones with a clear specialty that shows up, described the same way, on the pages these tools already read.
If you run the test and want help making sense of what came back, email your questions and results to lauren@lhoandco.com.