Biggest AEO Mistakes Local Businesses Make | What to Fix Right Now

A woman who runs a dog grooming business in Letchworth rang me three weeks ago in a proper state. She'd paid someone to "do her AEO" and after two months of work, she still wasn't showing up in a single AI search result. Not ChatGPT. Not Gemini. Not Perplexity. Nothing.

I had a look at what they'd done.

Honestly? I wanted to cry.

They'd basically just stuffed her homepage with the phrase "best dog groomer Letchworth" about forty times and called it a day. That's not AEO. That's barely even SEO. It's the kind of thing people were doing in 2009 and getting away with it, and even then it was rubbish.

So I thought I'd write out the actual mistakes I keep seeing. The real ones. The ones that are costing local businesses across North Hertfordshire real money right now.

You've written your website for humans who already know you

Sounds backwards, doesn't it? But this is the one I see most.

Your website reads like it was written for someone who's already met you, already knows what you do, already trusts you. It's all vibes. "Welcome to our website." "We pride ourselves on quality." "Get in touch to discuss your requirements."

None of that tells an AI anything useful.

When someone in Stevenage asks ChatGPT "who does emergency boiler repairs near me?", the AI is scanning the web for content that specifically mentions emergency boiler repairs in or near Stevenage. If your site just says "heating services" and leaves it at that, you're not in the conversation. You were never in the conversation.

Write for someone who has never heard of you and is asking a very specific question. Because that's exactly what's happening.

Where are you? No, seriously, where?

I did an audit for a builder in Baldock last month. Great website. Proper portfolio. Good testimonials. The word "Baldock" appeared once. On the contact page. In the postcode.

That's it. That was all the location information on the entire site.

I asked him where he works. He reeled off about twelve towns without pausing for breath. Hitchin, Royston, Stevenage, Letchworth, Biggleswade, Stotfold, Arlesey... I said mate, does your website mention any of these places?

Long pause.

No.

Right. So how is an AI supposed to know you work there? It can't read your mind. It reads your website. And your website apparently thinks you exist in some sort of geographic void.

Here's what needs to happen:

• Every service page should mention the towns you cover for that specific service
• Your homepage needs to make clear you serve North Hertfordshire (and name the towns)
• Case studies should say where the work happened, not just what you did
• FAQ answers should include location naturally ("Most bathroom refits we do in Hitchin and Letchworth take around three weeks")

I know it feels repetitive. My wife tells me I repeat myself all the time. But on your website, it's not repetition. It's information.

Your "About" page is doing nothing

Bit of a tangent but this one really gets me.

Most About pages I see for local businesses are either one paragraph of corporate waffle or a three-thousand-word autobiography that starts with "I've always been passionate about..." and I lose the will to live by the second sentence.

Neither of these helps with AI search.

Your About page should be working hard. Who you are. Where you're based. How long you've been doing this. What qualifies you. Where you work. What makes you different (actually different, not "we go the extra mile" different).

AI tools use your About page to establish whether you're a real, credible business. If it's thin or generic, that's a missed opportunity. And it's an easy fix. Half an hour of honest writing and you're sorted.

No proof of anything

I spoke to a carpet fitter near Royston who told me he'd done over 500 jobs in the last three years. Five hundred. And his website had... nothing. No photos of completed work. No testimonials. No case studies. Just a list of services and a phone number.

Would you ring that bloke based on his website alone? Course not. You'd ring the one whose site shows actual photos of actual fitted carpets in actual houses, with actual customers saying "yeah, they were brilliant."

AI thinks the same way.

Well, not exactly the same way. But it's looking for evidence. Concrete details it can reference when someone asks for a recommendation. If I ask you to recommend a restaurant to a friend, you'd say something specific. "The food was great" doesn't cut it. "They do this amazing lamb shank and the bloke who runs it used to work at The French House in Soho" does.

Give AI those specifics. Write up your best projects. Include the town, the job, the outcome, what the customer said. Even three or four decent case studies in the right format can completely change whether AI recommends you or not.

Your FAQ page doesn't exist

Stop it.

Every single business I've ever worked with has at least ten questions that customers ask them constantly. Every single one. You know what they are. You could list them right now if I asked you.

So why aren't they on your website?

AI tools answer questions. That's literally their entire purpose. If your website already contains those questions with clear, honest answers, you've given AI a reason to point people at you. If your website doesn't have them, AI finds someone else's website that does.

We've got a whole post on how to write FAQs that ChatGPT actually uses if you want the detail. But the short version is: write the questions your customers ask, answer them properly, put them on your site. Twenty minutes of work that could genuinely change your business.

Your name is different on every platform

The boring one. But bloody hell, this matters.

You're "Sarah's Beauty Studio" on your website. "Sarahs Beauty" on Google. "Sarah's Beauty Studio Hitchin" on Facebook. "S. Beauty Studio Ltd" on Companies House.

AI sees these as potentially four different businesses. It can't confidently say "this is the same company" when you've got four different names floating around. And when it's not confident, it just... doesn't recommend you. It picks someone whose information is consistent and clear.

Spend an afternoon. Go through every single listing, directory, and social media profile. Make them match. Same name. Same phone number. Same address. Tedious as anything. Works every time.

You think SEO is enough

OK so I need to be careful here because I'm not saying SEO doesn't matter. It absolutely does. We still think about traditional SEO alongside AEO for every client we work with.

But if your entire digital strategy is "rank on page one of Google" and nothing else, you're missing a growing chunk of how people actually find businesses in 2026.

More people are asking AI directly. "Who should I use for X in Y?" They're not scrolling through ten blue links. They're getting one name and calling that name. And if that name isn't yours, it's your competitor's.

The businesses paying attention to AEO now are building an advantage that compounds over time. AI tends to keep recommending businesses it's already recommended before. First movers get rewarded. Everyone else has to work harder later.

If you want to understand more about how that recommendation process works, have a read of how ChatGPT decides which business to recommend.

So what do you actually do about all this?

Fix your service pages so they describe what you actually do in plain English. Name every town you work in. Write up your best projects with real details. Add an FAQ section. Make your business name consistent everywhere. Update your About page.

None of it is complicated. Most of it takes a few hours total.

If you want someone to have a proper look at your site and tell you what's working and what's not, give us a shout. We work with local businesses across North Hertfordshire on answer engine optimisation and we'll tell you straight what needs doing first.