AI search
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6 min read
Guide
How to get your brand recommended by AI.
Get recommended by AI when a buyer asks an assistant what to buy or who to use, it answers with names. Here is how those recommendations form and how to get your brand onto the list.
E-commerceShopifyNationalAEO / GEO
Platforms and tools we work across every day
AI assistants increasingly sit between buyers and brands. Someone asks for the best product or supplier, and the assistant returns a shortlist. That shortlist is not random: it reflects the entities the model recognizes, the content it can draw on, and the sources it trusts.
Getting recommended, the practice called generative engine optimization, means influencing those inputs. You build a clear and consistent brand entity, publish the grounded factual content assistants pull from, and earn citations from sources they weight. It is early enough that focused brands can win before larger competitors even start.
The playbook
How AI recommendations are earned.
Every item here is something we actually do and hand over, not a line on a proposal.
Build a clear entity
Make your brand unambiguous across your site and the web so models recognize it.
Publish grounded content
Create the factual, comparison, and category content assistants draw from.
Earn trusted citations
Get mentioned and linked by the sources AI models weight.
Structure your facts
Use schema so key facts are machine readable and consistent.
Manage consensus signals
Reviews and third party consensus shape what assistants say.
Track and refine
Monitor how assistants describe and recommend you, then improve the inputs.
In practice
How we put this into practice.
Guides are only worth writing if they come from real work. Everything here is something we have had to solve on a live site, usually more than once.
- Build a clear entity
- Publish grounded content
- Earn trusted citations
AI answerlive
Who supplies bulk compostable packaging?
CitedYour product pageYour buying guideIndustry roundup
Answer engines
Search increasingly ends without a click.
AI Overviews and assistants answer directly and cite a few sources. Being one of those sources means writing answers a machine can lift cleanly and backing them with structure it can verify.
What changes
What you should expect.
We are not going to put invented numbers on this page. What follows is the kind of change a properly built program produces once it has had time to compound.
Apply it this week
Steps you can action without waiting on a full rebuild.
Written from real work
Based on problems we hit on live stores and supplier sites.
Platform-aware
Accounts for what Shopify and similar platforms make hard.
Built for AI search
Covers how answer engines change the approach.
bulk pricingnear mewholesalebest forvssupplierreviewsfast shipping
Search demand
One product has dozens of ways to be searched.
Buyers arrive through modifiers, comparisons, questions, and specifications. Mapping that whole cluster is how a page earns traffic beyond a single head term.
Service areas
All service areas
Chicago, the suburbs, and twenty states.
Each area gets its own page and its own content, because the search problem in a warehouse district is nothing like the one in a retail corridor.
Industries
All 15 industries
Industries we work in.
We work in a narrow set of categories on purpose. Depth in a few beats a shallow pass at everything.
Coverage
Chicago based. Working in all fifty states.
Local work when the map pack matters, national work when your buyers are spread across the country.
Each state above has its own page. Not listed? We work in all fifty, so just ask.
04
Chicago and beyond
Built here. Working everywhere.
We are a Chicago agency by address and a national one by practice. Most of our clients sell well past the city limits.
Tell us what you sell. We will tell you what is possible.
Two minutes now, a straight answer back within one business day. No obligation and no sales sequence.
(708) 289-1530
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Related work.
Other parts of the program that tend to matter for the same businesses.
In one line
To get recommended by AI assistants, build a clear brand entity, publish content they can draw on, and earn citations from sources they trust. Those three things shape the shortlist an assistant gives back.
Questions
Answers to common questions.
Still deciding? A visibility audit shows where you rank, where you are missing from AI answers, and the fastest path to gains.
Talk to a strategistCan you control what AI says about your brand?
You cannot edit an assistant's output directly, but you can strongly influence it by improving the entity, content, and citation signals these models rely on.
Is getting recommended by AI worth it?
Increasingly, yes. A growing share of buying research happens inside assistants, and being named there captures demand you would otherwise never see.
How is this measured?
By tracking how assistants describe and recommend your brand across representative prompts over time, alongside the underlying signals we can influence.
Get started
Ready to be the answer buyers get?
We map where you rank now, where you are missing from Google and AI answers, and what to fix first, in the order that makes the biggest difference.