Last week I did something I'd been curious about for a while. I opened ChatGPT and asked it to name the best insurance agency in my area. Then I asked Perplexity the same thing. Then Google's AI Overview.
Here's the part that made it interesting: I own one of the agencies in that market. So I wasn't running an experiment from the outside. I was watching to see whether the AI would name my firm, or hand the customer to someone else.
What I learned in those few minutes is the clearest way I know to explain what's actually changing about getting found online. Not the hype version. The real version.
Why does this matter for a small firm right now?
For years, getting found meant ranking on Google. You wanted to be one of the ten blue links on the first page, and you fought for position with everyone else in your market.
That's not how a growing number of your customers search anymore. They open an AI tool and ask a question in plain language, and the AI doesn't hand back ten links for them to sort through. It names one. Maybe two or three. The customer reads the answer, and a lot of the time they never click through to anyone's website at all. The decision happened inside the answer.
So the question stops being "where do I rank" and becomes "when someone asks the AI, does it say my name." Those are not the same game, and the second one is the one that's growing.
Why did the AI name a smaller firm over a bigger one?
Here's the thing that surprised me, and it's the part worth sitting with.
When the AI named an agency, it did not name the biggest one in town. The biggest agency has a beautiful website, a long history, and a domain that's been around far longer than mine. On paper it should win. It didn't.
It got skipped. And once you understand why, you can't unsee it.
A much larger agency in our market has a polished site with lots of pages. But almost none of those pages actually answer a question. They say things like "your trusted partner since 1985" and "get a quote today." That reads fine to a human skimming a homepage. But an AI can't cite a vibe. When someone asks a specific question, the AI is looking for a specific answer it can point to, and a homepage that says "we're the trusted choice" gives it nothing to grab.
The firm that got named had published a clear, specific answer to a real question. Something like whether a contractor needs workers' comp for 1099 subcontractors, answered plainly, in the kind of language a person actually uses. So when someone asked that question, the AI had something concrete to point at. It pointed at them.
It isn't about being the biggest. It's about being the most answerable.
What are customers actually asking?
This is where it gets practical, because the questions that matter aren't the obvious ones.
Nobody gets named for "insurance near me." The searches that decide things are specific and they come from someone who's close to a decision. "Does a general contractor need workers' comp for 1099 subcontractors?" "What does additional insured actually mean on my policy?" Real questions, with real buying intent behind them.
Whoever answered that question clearly online is who the AI hands the customer to. And that customer is most of the way to a decision before they ever fill out a form or pick up the phone. That's not a lead you're competing for in the usual way. That's a lead that got decided in the answer, and you either published the answer or you didn't.
Every industry has these questions. Yours does too. The firms that publish the clear answer get named. The firms that publish "we're the trusted choice since 1985" get skipped.
Do I need to buy an AEO tool for this?
No. And I want to be direct about this because there's a wave of tools showing up that sell you an "AEO score" or promise to optimize your "answer engine presence" for a monthly fee.
The fundamentals here are free. Google said as much in its own guidance recently: do the real work, ignore the gimmicks. The lever is not a subscription. The lever is answering the real questions your customers ask, in plain language, in a place the AI can find it.
That doesn't mean it's effortless. The work that actually matters is the thinking part: figuring out which questions your customers are really asking, and answering them clearly enough that an AI can point at the answer. That takes judgment. It does not take a tool, and it does not take a budget.
Where to start
Pick one. One real question you know your customers ask before they buy. Write the clearest, most specific answer you can, in the language they'd actually use, and publish it somewhere the AI can reach it. Not "we're experts in this." The actual answer to the actual question.
Then go ask ChatGPT that question and see who it names today. That tells you where you stand, and it's usually the moment this stops being abstract.
If you want help figuring out which questions your firm should own, and which ones you could realistically win, that's exactly the kind of thing I work through with people. Book a call with me and we'll map it out together. The link's below.
Book a strategy call: https://ironcladcreative.studio/onboarding