How To Become The Top Firm Recommended in AI Answers
By Tony Restell
Introduction
I’m Tony Restell, founder of Social Hire. For years, we invested in SEO and worked with SEO agencies. We sometimes reached page one, but not consistently for the search terms most likely to bring us business.
When AI engines appeared and Google began placing AI answers above traditional search result links, we decided not to pay another agency to get us appearing in those AI answers. Instead, we would work it out ourselves. We were hugely successful in getting Social Hire recommended by the AI engines - so much so that AEO work has now become a whole new service line in our business.
This article shares the action plan I detailed in my recent live webinar, so you can learn the approach by reading, or watching, as preferred.
Webinar recording
Prefer to watch? Here's the full webinar recording, which I've titled“How To Get Your Firm Recommended in Google's AI Overviews (Step-by-Step Instructions)”:
SEO and AEO require a different mindset
Traditional SEO often focuses on getting a page to rank for a particular phrase. AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation, is about helping AI engines understand what your business is expert in and when it is a credible recommendation.
This is driven by AI, and AI engines - ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and above all Google - are trying to give answers they have high confidence are correct. That is really powerful, because unlike a page you optimise for one phrase that either succeeds or doesn't, AI engines learn things about your expertise and your business. Crack the code that they think you are good at something, and it doesn't matter how people ask their question... there is a high probability you come up as one of the recommendations. But the flip side is just as true: as soon as the engines have any reason to think you are less likely to be the correct answer, you completely drop out of the results.
Start with clear positioning
AI engines really reward niche expertise, and generalists very rarely get recommended over specialists — unless you are a massive global brand like McKinsey or Robert Walters. As soon as you are into any kind of niche market, being a specialist is a real strength.
That does not mean you must stay in one lane. We optimised Social Hire to be the best social media agency for recruitment firms, the best for management consultancies, the best for SaaS businesses - you can have different sectors you appeal to or different services you offer, but you have to have clear positioning of what you specialise in. And what matters here is not that your positioning is clear to yourself and on your website. What matters is that the AI engines have a clear understanding of it.
Ask yourself:
- What do we want to be recommended for?
- Which clients and buying situations are the best fit?
- What strengths can we support with evidence?
- Do our website and other public profiles describe us consistently?
This works well for SME firms of any size, from a one-person business through to firms with 200+ staff.
Why start with Google?
Earlier in 2026 I shared figures showing that Google answers about 82% of all the questions asked across the platforms, other search engines around 11%, and all the other AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot and the rest — combined just 8%. Even more importantly, 85% of all Google searches now show an AI answer at the top of the page, so almost all of that 82% is Google answering with an actual AI answer rather than its regular page one rankings.
The practical point is that Google should be the starting place for B2B firms. On a Google results page today, you get the sponsored results, then the AI answer with its sources, then the regular page one rankings quite a long way down. So if you are doing SEO to get a particular page to appear on page one, you are now appearing a lengthy scroll down the page - and way ahead of you is every competitor that appears in the AI answer.
Another point of note: there is no such thing as being page one on Google anymore. Every run of an AI answer is a different query, so the same question typed ten times can produce different results and ordering. What you are looking for is to regularly be the company that is the top recommendation, ie. to appear in that result more times than not.
Four diagnostic questions to ask
Stick with Google to start with. If you do well in Google, you are likely to do well in two or three of the other engines for similar queries too, because they all pull on similar sources to varying degrees. Then test:
- “What can you tell me about [your company] and what makes them stand out?”
Does the answer describe your firm accurately? What expertise has Google picked up, and what is missing? - “Who are the best [type of firm] for [your ideal client] in [country or region]?”
This reveals which businesses are being recommended for the kind of work you want to be winning. - “Why is [your company] missing from this list?”
This detective work uncovers exactly why the AI answer does not view you as a credible recommendation to give, and therefore what your AEO work needs to overcome to start getting recommended. - “What are the most persuasive selling points for [your firm] to be included in this list?”
This reveals your strengths - what you can emphasise and play on to get bumped up and appearing in the results.
A lesson from Social Hire
Until the end of August, we were purely a social media agency. In September, we launched our AEO service, updated our website and announced it on our homepage. I also updated my LinkedIn profile.
Despite this, we were not showing up in searches when I started hunting for good AEO agencies to work with for a recruitment business, an advisory company, and a SaaS business. So I started quizzing Google — why are we missing from this page? — and what came back was fascinating. It said this list of AEO agencies had been drawn up from agencies with a practice dedicated to AEO, and while Social Hire does offer some AEO services, we were “a social media agency that is now helping a few clients with a bit of AEO work”. Because the engines did not view us as having a 50-50 focus split between social media and AEO, they did not view us as a credible answer to that question.
I dived in further — what makes you think that? — and the answer pointed to our wider digital footprint. There were loads of references to us being a social media agency and very few to any AEO work. Sure enough - our LinkedIn company page talked almost entirely about social media marketing work, our Crunchbase profile the same, and even the book-a-call page on our site said “if you'd like to talk to us about your social media strategy, book in for a call”.
That meant Google couldn't include us with any confidence in a list of specialist AEO agencies.
The lesson: make sure that everywhere you have a digital footprint, you are conveying the same message. If the engines have understood the wrong things about your business, the chances of them ever recommending you as the best at what you want to be recommended for really goes down the plug hole; this first diagnostic step matters precisely because, without it, you can end up accentuating the wrong message rather than improving your chances. Today, Social Hire is the top recommendation in Google for AEO agencies specialising in the recruitment sector - but we wouldn't be, if we hadn't caught that issue at the outset.
Action step 1: Add schema markup to key pages
Schema is code on your website that tells AI engines a lot more about your business - what you are expert in, what your ideal audience is, what services you offer, what countries you serve, who the founder is, what the legal entity of the business is. It also links your business to its profiles on sites such as Wikidata, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, X and YouTube, giving the engines a much bigger verified footprint to understand who you are.
It does a second job too: it adds question and answer blocks to every page on your website. Invisible to you and I visiting the page, but highly visible to the AI engines trawling sites looking for answers. Without creating any new blogs or service pages, by adding schema markup you dramatically increase the amount of FAQ information the engines are being fed.
Start with the homepage and your main menu pages as soon as possible, then expand to as many pages as you can over time. You don't have to rush to get the whole site done. Social Hire has around 4,000 pages, and we are achieving the top recommendations we are achieving with only a fraction of the site optimised in this way.
You can check any page — yours or a competitor's — with the Schema.org validator. For core pages, be particularly careful to check that the markup that's present in the page is rendering the way you intended (and without any errors or warnings) by running those pages through the validator.
Action step 2: Build external validation of your expertise
AI engines are very wary of recommending you or your business just on the strength of what you say on your own website. If you have a great website with great copy, case studies and testimonials, but nothing out there in the rest of the web backing up that positioning, it will really make your AEO results fall flat.
Focus on three kinds of validation:
- Detailed customer reviews on external websites: Don't be complacent if you have lots of five-star ratings that say nothing about you - that adds only a tiny bit of weight. You want written reviews that repeat your specific claims in a client's own words, such as how the 90-day guarantee made working with you reassuring and the results that your work delivered. It doesn't matter whether your reviews live on Google Reviews, Clutch, G2 or elsewhere - so long as they are somewhere, you can point the AI engines to them.
- LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit and external blogs: Industry publications and specialist blogs covering the topics you want to be known for are highly beneficial. Note, though, that this is different from SEO. SEO wanted backlinks, but here you want external sites saying things about you that validate what you claim on your own site — for example, an interview introducing you as the founder of Social Hire: a successful AEO agency that works with recruitment businesses and consulting firms. Unlike backlink chasing for SEO, you don't need huge volumes of these external endorsements: just a handful of external publications saying good things about you for each thing you want to be known as being best at.
- Appear in “Best” lists alongside other credible firms: Think of the rationale for this in the following way. If the other firms on the list are ones Google and ChatGPT already respect and recommend, their credibility pulls your business up to a similar level. But a self-serving list you write yourself, where everyone else is a weak firm you've only included to avoid naming real competitors, will not serve you at all.
In the webinar, I gave examples of a couple of clients who got to the top after blogs on our website compared their business with others in their space and set out the pros and cons of when to work with each. This balanced reporting helps AI engines understand when - and when not - to recommend a particular business. Which helps with giving the AI engines confidence that they are recommending a business in the right answers.
In our experience offering an AEO service that follows the approaches I've detailed here, most clients have been recommended as the best at what they do within four to five weeks of our work starting — and we ourselves were being recommended as the best B2B agency for our specialist areas in about five weeks, having previously not done particularly well in regular SEO rankings on either Google or Bing.
Note: Our service puts a guarantee behind that, getting you recommended as the best at what you do within three months. See our AEO services page for more.
Action step 3: Answer buyer-intent questions
Prospects ask AI engines a whole load of other questions beyond “who are the best firms for X” - questions that suggest they are quite close to wanting to engage a firm like yours, but aren't yet choosing which one. If someone asks “Should my corporate training company do its own social media, or should we outsource?”, you want to be the business providing the balanced answer to that. Why? Because if Google shows them your answer and directs them to your website, you are on their radar as they get close to the point of wanting to engage a business.
Figure out all the buyer intent questions people might ask, then answer them with content of your own: blogs on your website, editions of your LinkedIn newsletter, articles on Medium, Substack, your LinkedIn account or X — so long as it is clear which company authored the post. If you have linked to those profiles from your homepage schema, you've increased the likelihood the engines connect that expertise to your firm. Name your firm and drop a link to a page on your website somewhere in the article to ensure the connection is made.
This puts you on the radar in the weeks leading up to buyers drawing up a shortlist. They have been to your website, may have connected with you on LinkedIn or signed up to your email newsletter; you might choose to retarget them with ads.
Also worth highlighting is that each of the AI engines will be tracking what prospects have and haven't shown an interest in previously, so a buyer who has clicked through to your content is more likely to be served your future content and recommendations.
Request a free AI performance assessment
At the end of the webinar, I offered attendees a free AI performance assessment. We use an independent tool we're subscribed to to go out to the main engines, put a couple of dozen buyer questions to them and see which answers your firm appears in and which it doesn't. You will see your own performance AND which of your competitors are being recommended in your niche. You may want to go and look at those competitors' schema implementations and the external content they have been producing, to give you some additional quick win ideas to implement in your business.
To submit your firm's website, including what you'd want to be known as being best for (eg. “best accounting firm for online retailers in the UK”), and to pick a time for an optional 20-minute call to talk through the findings, use the link below. If you are not sure what you want to be known as best for, just say so in the notes and we will come up with an idea for you and run the report accordingly; equally, if you just want the report and no call, that is fine too - simply mention that in the notes.
Request your free AI performance assessment
Webinar Q&A Session
Will AI recommend a generalist with a geographic niche?
You are most likely to come up in the geographies the search is being undertaken in, as most engines will default to the searcher's location if they haven't put a geography in their question. And it is fine to be a generalist. However, note this: whatever represents the bulk of the work you do, try to have pages and validation that position you as an expert in each of those areas. If you are an accounting firm doing personal tax filing, VAT returns, company accounts and payroll, a firm with a page outlining each of those areas of expertise is far more likely to be recommended for “a good accountant to help with my payroll” than one that just says it is a generalist accountancy.
Is schema added manually or automated?
Many website-building platforms such as WordPress and GoHighLevel have add-ons that will insert schema for you — some generate it automatically, others ask you questions and build it from your answers. As a quick first step to get the bare bones of schema on your site, that route is certainly valid. But by and large they are not as good as you going to the full length of creating your own. So, for your core pages, go the extra mile with really strong schema.
Can AI help create schema?
Yes, absolutely. You can ask the likes of Gemini or Claude to analyse your site, tell you what is stopping it from showing up in AI answers, and even come up with example schema to include. Just make sure you understand schema yourself — what the AI produces may not include everything you would want to be in there — and do the positioning work first, because any automation accentuates what is already being understood about the business.
Next steps
If you would like to understand how Social Hire approaches AEO and GEO, visit our AI search optimisation services page.
To get your free AI performance assessment, click the link and choose a 20-minute time slot for us to discuss the findings (or mention in the notes that you'd just like the report and no call).
Sources Used
- YouTube recording, Tony Restell, “How To Get Your Firm Recommended in Google's AI Overviews (Step-by-Step Instructions)”, webinar and presentation
- Google Search Central, AI features and your website.
- Schema.org, Markup Validator.
