It's no surprise that the experience of finding and deciding on a product, service, or business is changing fast.
Even watching how my own purchase decisions have changed has been fascinating.
Last week, I went into Five Star Sports, here in Corvallis, looking for some new running shoes.
I found the shoes I liked and was ready to purchase, but the owner had one color, which I didn't like, and the distributor couldn't get any other colors in for months. While I would have loved to purchase locally and support small businesses in my town, this one just didn't work out.
So what did I do?
I took a picture on my phone of the shoe and the product information, sent it to Muse, my AI assistant, and it scoured the internet to find the shoe in my size, in different colors, available now.
It found several options on New Balance's direct-to-consumer site, and even offered to purchase them for me without having me do anything but say the word.
By the way, this is another interesting shift in purchasing that is still being worked out: Amazon is blocking AI agents from making purchases on users' behalf, while Walmart is rolling out the welcome mat to agents.
Anyway, I ended up finishing the purchase using an AI agent, which raises a whole host of interesting questions around attribution, Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, and how online shopping behavior is changing.
But I tell you that story because it's just one small example of how the purchase journey, from discovery all the way to choosing a business or a product, is shifting in dramatic ways.
So the question I want to focus on is this: how should a small business in Oregon consider these shifts in user behavior, and how should it influence its digital marketing strategy moving forward?
Here's my take on the five most important things any small business should be thinking about right now when it comes to AEO (answer engine optimization).
Track prompts, not just keywords. Prompt tracking is the new baseline research: learn what customers actually ask AI, and whether you show up in the answers.
SEO is still the foundation. If search engines can't find and understand you, AI search won't surface you either.
Reputation decides who gets cited. For local businesses, AI leans on third-party proof — your Google Business Profile, reviews, Reddit, Quora, Wikipedia — and that proof carries more weight than ever.
Govern your content and structure it well. A clean, organized, up-to-date site is what machines can actually read and trust.
Publish the facts AI needs, where it can reach them. FAQs, pricing, services, and key details should live on your site in plain language — not buried, gated, or missing.
Let's add some color to each one of these points.
Track prompts, not just keywords
When natural language tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode came on the market, the way users do research shifted dramatically.
Previously, a user might have run three separate Google searches: “roofing companies Corvallis,” “how much does a roof replacement cost,” and “metal vs. asphalt shingle roofs.”
Now that same user packs modifiers, conditions, and intent into a single query in a tool like ChatGPT, and talk-to-type makes that even easier, because speaking a long, detailed question produces better results than typing a short one.
What that looks like now is a user asking ChatGPT:
I need a new roof for my 1,800 sq ft home in Corvallis. Can you tell me the average price of a new roof in my area, what types of roofs I could get, and the differences between them? And then list the top-rated roofers in Corvallis and specify whether they offer financing.
What was once 15 words across three separate queries becomes 50-plus words in a single query.
Why should that matter to your business?
It matters because as Google promotes AI Mode and AI Overviews more and more, and users shift from traditional search to natural language conversations with LLMs, your brand presence, your brand reputation, and how LLMs talk about your business can mean a new lead — or a turned-away customer.
What you need to understand as a business is the same thing you already understood when you were doing SEO, and even long before that. What does my target audience care about? What are their fears? What are their problems? What questions can I help answer?
You now just have to reframe those questions into the prompts your target audience is likely to ask LLMs.
There are plenty of resources on prompt tracking to get you started, but the main point is that by beginning to track prompts, you're helping your business understand three things:
Accuracy of information: do LLMs speak accurately about my business?
Reputation: do LLMs recommend me, and why or why not? What competitors do they recommend instead, and why?
Visibility: do I even show up as an option for prospective customers?
Each of these categories helps prioritize where you need to invest time and resources: content, brand reputation, or brand awareness.
For example, if you begin tracking prompts and learn that LLMs know very little about your business, your services, your pricing, and your history, it's likely due to insufficient, outdated content on your website — content that's difficult to find even in traditional search.
If you discover that LLMs often quote Reddit threads and Google Business reviews that hurt your business's reputation, it's time to build a comprehensive review campaign so your business becomes a trusted option.
If you're not visible at all, start with a traditional SEO strategy and some brand awareness tactics.
All that to say, prompt tracking gives your business a benchmark to start your AEO strategy from.
SEO is still the foundation
In all the hype around AI search, I've seen lots of businesses suddenly care about showing up in AI search — but they never had an SEO strategy to begin with. That's like building a mansion on a foundation of sand.
There's nothing there to hold it up.
Good AEO begins with good SEO.
The businesses that have been investing in SEO for years are going to have a leg up in the AEO race.
The SEO tactics that carry over most directly are the unglamorous ones:
Pages built around real questions, with clear titles and headings that state the answer up front.
Fast, mobile-friendly pages. AI tools favor sources that load cleanly and read clearly.
Local SEO fundamentals: a complete, accurate Google Business Profile, a consistent name, address, and phone number everywhere, and location pages for the areas you serve.
A crawlable site structure, with internal links and an XML sitemap, so both search engines and AI crawlers can find every page.
Original content grounded in real experience — project photos, local examples, named staff — rather than generic copy any AI tool could have written.
Schema markup (FAQ, LocalBusiness, and Service) that labels your facts in a format machines can parse.
None of this is new. That's the point: AEO rewards the businesses that already did the fundamentals.
Reputation decides who gets cited
I've done several audits of businesses in Benton County based on digital visibility, and one thing always correlates with local queries and visibility in Google AI Overviews: a strong Google Business Profile review presence.
There's just no getting around traditional marketing and business best practices. If you are well thought of, well recommended, and well reviewed online, your business will show up in AI Overviews. These LLMs want to recommend businesses with proven results and a proven reputation.
You can do all the AEO and SEO you want, but without a track record of high-quality results in your niche, lifted by a strong online review profile, you're going to have a hard time getting mentioned and recommended by LLMs.
Govern your content and structure it well
Just like SEO, the content on your site needs to be well structured, easily crawled, and up to date.
The most helpful thing about prompt tracking is that it shows you where the content gaps on your website are — or what old pages and links still get referenced that you didn't know still existed.
And just like we all know already, LLMs hallucinate. If they can't find information on your site about pricing, or about the services or products you offer, they may just make it up.
And if you see that happening, it means there is no accurate, up-to-date information on your website for the LLM to reference.
When you prioritize site governance, you'll find content gaps you can fill and areas of your site that can be cleaned up, updated, made more comprehensive, or deprecated entirely.
The goal is the same as in traditional marketing and SEO: be a helpful guide to prospective customers through comprehensive, resourceful information on your website.
Answer questions, create guides, and publish answers to frequently asked questions.
And do it all in a way that is well structured. Don't bury answers. Don't create generic content that any AI tool could have written itself. Follow standard SEO best practices, including Google's E-E-A-T criteria.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — Google's criteria for judging content quality. In plain terms: Experience means showing firsthand knowledge — real projects, real photos, real local work, not stock claims. Expertise means demonstrating that you actually know your trade. Authoritativeness means other credible sources — reviews, citations, links — vouch for you. And Trustworthiness, the most important of the four, means your site is accurate, transparent, and honest: real prices, real contact information, real answers. AI tools lean on the same signals when they decide who to cite, which is why E-E-A-T is no longer just an SEO checklist — it's the reason you get recommended or passed over.
The best thing about LLMs is that they force website owners to be more disciplined. If content is no longer relevant or is out of date, deprecate it or update it, and publish something better.
Govern your website well, and it will benefit you in more ways than just visibility in LLMs.
Publish the facts AI needs, where it can reach them
It still baffles me how many businesses don't publish their pricing. It's the fastest way to lose a prospective customer's trust before you ever get to talk to them.
Picture two restaurants in Corvallis. Same quality, same price range, same kind of food. One posts its full menu with prices online. The other posts a menu with no prices and a note to call for details. Which one gets the table? The first one, almost every time — and the customer never even calls the second. The diner didn't choose the better restaurant; they chose the one that answered their question. Your prospective customers do the same thing, whether they're choosing a roofer, a dentist, or a running shoe store. If your pricing and details aren't published, you're the restaurant with no pricing on the menu.
Which brings me to point number five.
By now, you should know exactly what information your target audience is looking for in their buyer journey.
So answer the questions they're asking. Do it in helpful FAQ sections, and write articles about more complex topics like pricing and product comparisons.
A lot of this is just website and SEO best practice.
Create a helpful, easy-to-navigate structure on your website, and make it a goal that prospective customers never leave your site because the information they need — or answers to the questions they're asking — isn't there.
Conclusion
Don't forget that the purpose and key principles of marketing do not change — but user journeys always will.
We're in the middle of a large shift right now, but the businesses that win it won't be the ones chasing every new AI feature. They'll be the ones that do the fundamentals better than everyone else: being a helpful guide to their customers, making it easy for them to become a lead, building a strong brand reputation, and making sure the business is findable at the right place and at the right time.
If you take one thing from each of the five points, let it be this: start tracking the prompts your customers actually ask; shore up the SEO foundation before you worry about anything else; earn the reviews and reputation that make AI tools confident recommending you; clean up and govern the content you already have; and publish the facts — pricing, services, answers — that customers and LLMs are looking for.
Search has changed before, and it will change again. The businesses that treat AI search as a reason to finally be clear, helpful, and easy to find are the ones that will show up — in search results, in AI answers, and in their customers' decisions.
Want help getting a baseline of where your business stands in new AI search experiences? Request a free audit today.
