The Phone Started Ringing From Texas
I built a one-page AEO agency site, did the work on it, got busy, and forgot to check whether it was working. Turns out it was. Somebody in England had to tell me.
By Mark Andrew Palmer · · 7 min read
Agency AEO ranked nationally for AI search optimization before Mark Palmer knew it. Calls came from Texas, South Carolina, D.C., and England. Here is why.
A few weeks ago I got a call from a business owner in Texas.
I know people in Texas. I have never marketed in Texas. Those are different things, and this was not one of the people I know. This was a stranger who had found Agency AEO, read what we do, and wanted to talk about getting his company recommended by ChatGPT.
Fine. Interesting, but fine.
Then somebody in South Carolina. Then somebody in Washington, D.C. Then more, from all over the country, and then a man in England. Actual England, with the accent. I run an agency in Louisville, Kentucky. I have never spent a dollar or a minute marketing to England. And here was a guy across the ocean who had typed a question into Google, and Google handed him me.
So after the England call I did what I should have done a month earlier and searched for my own agency.
Agency AEO was number two in the country for "AEO agency." Not Louisville. The whole country. And here is the crazy part. It was a one-page website. One page. No blog, no library, no forty service pages, no content team cranking out filler. One page, built right, outranking agencies with a hundred employees and a podcast. And I had no idea. That is the part that pisses me off and makes me laugh at the same time. I built the thing, ran the playbook on it, went off to do the same work for clients, and never circled back to look at the scoreboard. The scoreboard had to call me. Collect.
I would like to say I was surprised. I would also like to keep my reputation for honesty.
You Already Know What Changed
I am not going to spend six paragraphs explaining AI search to you like it is a new planet. You have used ChatGPT. You have seen the AI box on top of Google. You know the deal.
Here is the only part that matters for your business. Google used to give you ten links. AI gives you one answer. When somebody asks ChatGPT or Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews who to call for the thing you do, it names a business. One, maybe two. Not ten. There is no page two of an answer.
If the AI says your name, you win. If it does not, you do not get a notification about it. You just get a slower month.
AEO, GEO, AI SEO, and the Rest of the Alphabet
You are going to run into a pile of acronyms for this, and every one of them has somebody selling it as the one true religion. Let me save you the seminar.
AEO is Answer Engine Optimization: getting your business into the answer AI gives. GEO is Generative Engine Optimization: getting into the content AI generates, which is the same answer wearing a different hat. AI SEO, or AISEO if the person selling it wants to sound like a chemical, is the traditional SEO toolkit pointed at AI platforms instead of a results page. AI visibility, AI search optimization, LLM optimization, whatever gets coined next quarter. They are different in the details and the details are real, but do not lose the plot.
Fundamentally, you want AI platforms to recommend your business. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Overviews. When somebody asks any of them who to call, you want the answer to be you. That is the whole game. Every acronym is a route to the same destination, and anybody who needs a forty-slide deck to explain it is billing you for the slides.
The Contrarian Part
Everybody in my industry is currently selling one of two things: AI panic or AI snake oil. Let me be the guy who sells neither.
Some people are getting replaced by AI. That is real and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But most of you are not. Most of you are going to get replaced by the business down the street that ChatGPT likes better. That is a very different problem and it has a very different fix.
And no, SEO is not dead. Every SEO person on LinkedIn is right about that. What they leave out is that the prize changed. They still sell you a ranking, and a ranking used to pay: third on page one was a living. Now the person searching reads one AI answer and never scrolls to the list. The signals SEO built still count, because AI reads them. The scoreboard changed. Half the industry is still playing the old game and wondering why the phone got quiet.
The other thing nobody wants to hear: your website is no longer the only thing that matters. It still matters. When ChatGPT recommends you, where do you think it sends people? Your website. A human lands there and a human has to decide to call, so how it is built and how it looks are absolutely part of the deal. I said as much in July, loud enough to annoy some people. But the website alone does not get you recommended. What gets you recommended is what the AI platforms know about you. Whether your name, address, and category say the same thing everywhere. Whether real people vouch for you. Whether you have ever actually answered, in plain English, the question your customers ask at eleven at night. ChatGPT and Google read all of that first, and only then does anybody see your site.
How I Got Ahead of It
It was a bit of a vision, I will give myself that. I saw it coming. Then again, Stevie Wonder could have seen that shit coming. I just saw it before most people did, which has been a thing with me for as long as I can remember. Seeing it early is not the trick. Acting on it is. That is the part most people skip, and it is the only part that counts.
When AI answers showed up, it was obvious to me that the businesses I work with, roofers and lawyers and restaurants and fabricators, were about to get quietly cut out of a conversation they did not know was happening. So I built Agency AEO under Omythic to handle exactly that. Then I did the thing I make every client do. I ran it on us first. Cleaned up the entity. Fixed the signals. Wrote content that actually answers the questions people type. Built the site so AI could read it as easily as a person.
Then I went to work on client accounts and forgot about our own.
Which is how you end up number two in the United States with one page and find out from a man in England. Some shit just works when you do it right, whether you are watching or not.
And Now the Rules Change Again
"AEO agency" is a real search. People do their homework, they type it in, they find me, and I have the contact forms to prove it. Texas, South Carolina, and D.C. were just the first ones I noticed. Since then it has been people from all over the country, plus the gentleman in England. I am keeping that door.
But that is the search people make after they already know what they need. I want the one they make before that. "How do I get my business ranked on ChatGPT." "Why does AI recommend my competitor and not me." That is where the business owner actually starts, and that is where I want to be standing when they get there.
So the one-page site is not one page anymore. I invented the Superblog, a full library of plain-English articles and interactive guides answering exactly those questions, and I put it on agencyaeo.com. Now I am going after those searches in public, with a small agency in Louisville, against the whole industry. You can watch it happen. I will be watching this time too.
Where the Free Stuff Is
I am not going to pitch you. I will tell you where to look, because that is what I would want.
The library is called Insights and it lives at agencyaeo.com/insights. Everything in it is written for business owners, not engineers, and every piece answers a question people are actually typing into ChatGPT and Google. How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT. Why ChatGPT recommends your competitor instead of you. How to show up in Google's AI Overviews. How AI picks local businesses. And what AEO costs and how long it takes, which is the article nobody in my industry wants to publish. So I did.
There is also a tool in there. The 20-Minute AI Visibility Audit. Nine prompts, four AI platforms, a score out of 72. Twenty minutes and a laptop. When you are done you know one of three things: AI recommends you, AI ignores you, or AI prefers your competitor by name.
Do that before you call anybody. Including me. A number is harder to argue with than a hunch.
Go Ask It
Tonight, ask ChatGPT who to call in your town for the thing you do. Ask Google. Ask Perplexity. Read what comes back.
If it is you, good. Now go find out why so it stays you.
If it is somebody else, now you know, and it took you two minutes instead of a slow quarter.
Here is the thing to sit with. Right now, somebody in your town is asking that exact question, and somewhere a phone is about to ring. That part is not up to you. Whose phone is.
Mine started ringing from Texas. Yours can start ringing from wherever you like.
Tags: AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, AI Search, Agency AEO, GEO, AI Visibility, Business, Digital Strategy, Louisville, Omythic, Mark Palmer