Found by people — and by AI.
Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is the work of making a site the source an AI answer quotes. When someone asks where to go tasting this weekend, the answer increasingly comes from ChatGPT, Claude or a Google AI Overview instead of a page of blue links. Stave does the proven SEO work and the newer job of making sure those answers name your place, correctly, with a link.
01 How an AI decides to mention you
It reads the question
"Best winery near Elkin for a Saturday tasting." The model pulls out the place, the intent and the constraints.
It retrieves sources
It fetches raw HTML. The crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity do not execute JavaScript, so anything that appears only after scripts run is invisible to them, as is a wine list locked in a PDF. Googlebot renders pages. The AI crawlers largely do not.
It extracts answers
Clear, definitive statements get quoted. Hedged marketing copy does not. "Open Thursday to Sunday, tastings $15" is citable. "An experience like no other" is not.
It names its sources
A handful of sources, typically three to eight, get named with links. Everyone else is invisible, because there is no page two of an AI answer.
02 What Stave does about it
Structured data, everywhere
LocalBusiness (Winery, Brewery), Product and Event schema with address, geo-coordinates, opening hours and links to your profiles. Google states no special markup is required for AI Overviews, so this is not a magic trigger. It removes ambiguity about who and where you are, and that ambiguity is usually why an assistant stays vague.
Real pages for real things
Every wine, beer, pressing and batch on a server-rendered HTML page, out of PDFs and out of Instagram-only announcements. Server-side rendering is a visibility requirement for AI search rather than a performance nicety.
Answer-first writing
Pages built around the questions people actually ask. What is pouring, can you bring kids, does it ship to Texas. Answered plainly enough to be extracted whole.
Crawler access, deliberately
GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot deliberately allowed in robots.txt, with clean sitemaps and no crawl errors. Pages that are blocked, broken or behind a login are not candidates for citation at all.
Speed as a ranking input
Pages that pass Core Web Vitals on a phone with one bar of signal. Speed is a documented Google page-experience signal, and the server-rendered HTML that makes a site fast is the same HTML the AI crawlers can read.
The classics, still
Google Business Profile is the primary data layer feeding Google’s AI answers for local queries, so it gets treated as a first-class asset. Complete profile, matching name, address and hours in your schema, and recent reviews with owner responses. Review volume, recency and response rate all feed citation eligibility.
FAQ Fair questions
Does this replace normal SEO?
No. It sits on top of it. The same structure, speed and clarity that earn a Google ranking are what earn an AI citation. One body of work, two kinds of visibility.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT mentions us?
No one honest can, and anyone promising it is guessing — there is no ranking dashboard for AI answers. What I can do is remove every documented technical reason you'd be skipped, give the models clean facts to quote, and track how often your name appears across the assistants.
We're small. Does this matter yet?
Small is the advantage, because most of your competition has nothing to read. Audits of local business sites keep finding that the majority carry no structured data at all, and pages built to sell get passed over for pages that answer the question.
Is this a one-time fix?
The foundation is built once. The edge comes from freshness, because current hours, new releases, seasonal events and recent reviews are the signals local AI answers lean on. Monthly care keeps them current.
Be the answer, not page two.
Tell me your region and what you pour, and I will tell you what the AI engines currently say about you.
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