7 AEO Mistakes Small Businesses Make

The seven most common AEO mistakes are blocking AI crawlers by accident, letting your business facts disagree across the web, a homepage that never says what you do, hiding answers in images or phone calls, buying reviews or links, writing for keywords instead of questions, and never reading what the assistants say. Each one is fixable, and each takes about 15 minutes to spot.

AEO, answer engine optimization, is the work of getting recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT, as the complete AEO guide explains. If you want the list of reasons an assistant skips a business, read why AI doesn't recommend your business. This post is the opposite list: what to stop doing.

1. Blocking the AI crawlers without knowing it

A crawler is a program that visits your pages so a search tool can read them. OpenAI's documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot, the crawler for ChatGPT search, will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Most owners never chose that. A web designer hid the site while it was being built and nobody switched it back, or a setting was left on.

To spot it, type yoursite.com/robots.txt into your browser. That plain text file lists which crawlers may visit. A line reading Disallow: / under User-agent: * asks every crawler to skip the whole site. If your site runs on WordPress, also open Settings, then Reading, and make sure the box called Discourage search engines from indexing this site is unchecked.

If you find a block you did not intend, ask whoever manages your site to remove it. OpenAI says its systems can take about 24 hours to adjust after a robots.txt change. The full list of crawlers and what each does is in the robots.txt guide.

2. Letting your business facts disagree

Google's Business Profile help says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local search results. Assistants face the same problem a customer does: if two sources disagree, which one is true?

Say a heating and cooling company in Harlingen moved to a new street two years ago. The website is right, the Google profile is right, but Facebook still shows the old address and a directory lists a phone number that now rings a former employee. An assistant that reads all four may repeat any of them.

To spot it, write the name, address, phone, hours and services as they appear on your website, then compare them with your Google profile, Facebook, Yelp and any map or directory listing. Fix every mismatch to one master version. The Google Business Profile checklist covers Google, and Bing Places and Apple Business Connect covers two more places that feed answers.

3. A homepage that never says what you do and where

Picture a bakery in Mission whose homepage is a rotating photo slider and the words "Sabor de familia." Customers love it in person. An assistant reading that page cannot tell whether it sells bread, cakes or catering, or which town it is in.

To spot it, look at your homepage for ten seconds, then ask a stranger to say what you sell and where. If they hesitate, so will an assistant. Google's guidance on AI features lists making sure important content is available in textual form as a standing best practice, meaning words on the page and not words baked into a picture.

The fix is one plain sentence near the top: what you are, what you do, which cities you serve, when you are open and how to reach you. Then give each main service its own page, so an assistant has something specific to quote.

4. Hiding the answer in an image, a PDF or a phone call

Customers ask assistants practical things: what does it cost, are you open Sunday, do you take my insurance, do you come to my town. If the answer lives only in a photographed price list, a flyer saved as a picture, or a "call us for details," there is nothing to quote.

A PDF is a gray area. Google lists PDF as a file type it can index, so a real text PDF is not invisible. A scan or a photo of a menu is a picture, though, and a PDF also tends to go stale while an old copy lingers somewhere. Say a pediatric clinic in Edinburg lists accepted insurance as a JPG on its homepage. A parent asking an assistant about it gets nothing from the site.

To spot it, find each of these four answers as ordinary text on a page of your site:

• Price, or at least what affects it.
• Hours, including weekends.
• What you accept: insurance, payment types, walk-ins.
• Where you serve, by town.

The fix is to type the answer. You do not need exact prices, but a sentence on what moves the price beats "call us."

5. Buying reviews or link packages

It is tempting to buy 50 reviews or 500 links when a competitor is ahead. Google's Maps policy says content that was paid for, directly or in kind, is not allowed, and neither are reviews posted because the business offered an incentive. It also says violating content will be removed and that accounts can be suspended or terminated.

Links work the same way. Google's spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam, and say such sites may rank lower or not appear in results at all. Paid links are not a violation if they carry a nofollow or sponsored tag. Separately, a Federal Trade Commission rule on fake reviews took effect on October 21, 2024, and it prohibits buying reviews.

To spot it, look for any offer of a fixed number of reviews or links, any discount you give for a review, and any "SEO package" that will not name the sites. Replace them with slower, real work: ask every customer, as in how to get more Google reviews, and learn the difference in good backlink vs spam link.

6. Writing for keywords instead of questions

A keyword is the phrase someone types into a search box. A page stuffed with "plumber Pharr TX, best plumber Pharr, cheap plumber Pharr" reads like a list and answers nothing. People now ask full questions: "who can come tonight for a burst pipe in Pharr, and what will it cost?"

To spot it, read your main service page out loud. Does it answer the questions a caller would ask in the first minute: what you fix, when you can come, what drives the price, which towns you cover? If it only repeats the service name, rewrite it as answers. The ten kinds of questions customers ask AI gives you templates, and own a topic, not a keyword explains why depth on one subject beats many thin pages.

7. Never checking what the assistants say

Most owners have never asked an assistant about their own business, so nobody notices when it names a rival, repeats an old address or says nothing at all. You cannot fix an answer you have never read.

Spot it in two minutes. Open ChatGPT in a fresh chat, ask what a stranger would ask, such as "best tile installer in San Juan TX," and read who is named. Answers change between asks, so repeat it a few times. The free check on Growrank's scan page does the first step for you, and how to check what ChatGPT says has the full routine.

One more habit goes with this: expecting overnight results. Nobody can guarantee that an assistant will name you, and changes tend to show up over weeks and months. The Growrank dashboard checks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity every week and keeps the history, so you can see what moved. See the plan details: $39 a month, with the first 7 days free, card required, cancel anytime.

If you have one hour, do items 1, 2 and 7 first. They are free, fast and tell you where you stand. Then follow the 30-day plan to get recommended by ChatGPT for the order of everything else.

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