27 Mar How to Make AI Recommend YOUR Business

by Kalika Yap

I just attended one of those AI talks that makes you want to run home and start making changes immediately. Draye Redfern, who runs a marketing agency and owns fractionalCMO.com, flew from Texas to our Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) Los Angeles event and shared something I think every entrepreneur needs to understand right now: how to get AI to recommend your business to potential customers.

Here’s the thing. We all use AI now. Draye’s four-year-old son wrote his first book using Claude and Gamma. His 68-year-old mother takes a photo of what’s in the fridge and asks AI what to make for dinner. And somewhere between 4 and 68, this is becoming our reality, too.

But Draye’s talk wasn’t about how to use AI more effectively. It was about how to get used by AI. How to become the business that AI recommends when someone asks for exactly what you offer.

That distinction stopped me in my tracks. I took pages of notes, and I want to share the best of them with you.

The Big Shift: From Clickable to Citable

For 25 years, the marketing game has been: get to the top of Google’s search results. Ten blue links. Fight for position one. Build backlinks. Hope for clicks.

That game is changing fast. Draye shared that 50% of consumers are now deliberately choosing AI search over Google. AI-referred visitors spend 9 to 10 minutes on a page compared to a fraction of that from Google. And 60 to 70% of Google searches now end with zero clicks anyway.

AI traffic grew 7x between 2024 and 2025. And 73% of businesses are already using AI for content creation. The shift isn’t coming. It’s here.

The old way: Be clickable. Rank on Google and hope people click.

The new way: Be citable. Become the business that AI recommends as the answer.

The question isn’t “Will AI replace me?” It’s “How can I use AI to become irreplaceable?”

The Lead Framework: How to Rank in Ai

Draye introduced a framework he calls LEAD. I love how clear and actionable it is. Here’s how it breaks down:

L — Label: Make Yourself Identifiable by AI

This was the single biggest takeaway from the entire talk. If you do nothing else, do this: add schema markup to your website.

Schema is code that sits behind the scenes on your site and tells AI exactly who you are, what you do, where you’re located, and who you serve. Think of it like a label on the outside of a box in a warehouse. Without it, AI has to open every single box to find the sugar. With schema, it can go straight to your box.

The stat that got everyone’s attention: adding schema gives you a 70% greater likelihood of being mentioned by AI.

Two ways to do it:

Quick method: If you’re on WordPress, install a plugin like Rank Math or Yoast SEO. You can set up basic schema in about 10 minutes. It’s free or roughly $100/year.

Stronger method: Have a developer hard-code the schema directly into your site pages. This costs roughly $500 to $2,000 and is more effective because AI reads hard-coded schema more easily.

Pro tip: AI tools can write code, but they don’t read code on your website very well yet. Hard-coding schema gives AI the clearest possible signal about your business.

E — Expert: Prove Your Credibility

Draye walked us through Google’s E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), which also applies to how AI evaluates your business:

• Experience: Share case studies, first-hand results, and real outcomes. Content like “How we helped a CPG brand grow 3X in 90 days” signals experience.
• Expertise: Your credentials, author bios, and professional background all matter. What separates you from everyone else in your field?
• Authoritativeness: Media features, speaking engagements, and press mentions carry weight. If you’ve been featured in Forbes, a major newspaper, or a known podcast, link to those articles from your site.
• Trustworthiness: Reviews on Google, Trustpilot, and third-party sites. Privacy policies. External links pointing to your site. All of these build trust with AI.

Big win: Write a book. Even a short one. Draye’s most profitable book was 80 pages, written in four days. The Amazon author page and Goodreads profile create additional external links that give your brand significant credibility with AI.

A — Network: Build External Validation

This is about creating a web of proof that AI can verify. The more places your brand shows up consistently, the more AI trusts that you are who you say you are.

• Get a Google Knowledge Panel (getting on podcasts was one of the biggest catalysts for earning Draye’s)
• Claim or create a Wikipedia article (Draye spent six months getting his approved)
• Create a Crunchbase profile (free, takes about a week)
• Maintain consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) across every directory and listing
• Build presences on relevant industry directories and platforms

A word of caution on NAP consistency: If you’ve been using different tracking phone numbers for different ad channels, AI finds that confusing. It can’t confidently confirm you’re the same business. One consistent number across everything is best for AI ranking.

D — Design (Structure): Make It Easy for AI to Read You

Remember: AI is lazy. The easier you make it for these systems to crawl and understand your site, the more often they’ll recommend you.

Draye shared a technical checklist:

• llms.txt — A file that tells AI systems, “Hey, come here and read this. This is for you.”
• robots.txt — For traditional search engine crawling
• Sitemap submitted to Google and Bing, with last-modified timestamps
• Schema in HTML (not hidden in JavaScript)
• Schema validation — Make sure your schema is correct
• Internal links working (no dead links)
• Site speed — Use Google’s free PageSpeed tool
• Mobile-friendly design (50%+ of traffic is now mobile)
• HTTPS enabled
• Cloudflare settings — If you use Cloudflare, make sure you haven’t accidentally blocked AI from visiting your site. There’s a toggle that blocks all LLMs by default.

Test your score: Go to aeo-test.ai and enter your website URL. It will show you a score and tell you exactly what to fix.

9 Trends Shaping Digital Marketing in 2026

Draye closed with nine trends he’s tracking. Here are the ones I found most relevant for entrepreneurs:

Trend 1: On-Platform Lead Capture
Social platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook are penalizing you harder than ever when your content tries to move people off-platform. Even “click the link in bio” is getting throttled.

The fix: Keep your lead capture inside the platform. Tools like ManyChat trigger automated DM conversations when someone comments with a keyword, so you capture their information without them ever leaving.

Trend 2: Search Everywhere Optimization
Search is no longer just Google. Instagram (now indexable by Google as of Q4 2025), YouTube (3B+ daily searches), TikTok (becoming a product search engine), and ChatGPT are all places people search now.

Action: Weave targeted keywords into scripts, captions, on-screen text, and descriptions. Build topic clusters. Optimize for conversational search, because people now type full phrases and questions.

Trend 3: The AI Slop Problem
Hallucination rates in free vs. paid AI tools are nearly identical. People trust answers that look correct but are completely wrong. Top performers use AI for first drafts and ideation, but always have a human do the final review.

Trend 4: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Create content in very specific niches. Don’t just write about your broad topic. Write for micro-categories. The more specific sub-topics you own, the more AI cites you as a source.

Trend 5: AI Ads Are Coming
When platforms like ChatGPT and others turn on advertising (likely this year), the targeting will be incredibly precise because of all the personal data people have shared with their AI tools. Start building your brand presence now.

Trend 6: Browsers as AI Platforms
AI is moving into the browser layer, not just the website layer. Draye demonstrated how he used Perplexity’s Comet browser to find his insurance license numbers, locate the payment pages, and handle the entire renewal process. All he had to do was enter his credit card.

Chrome’s Gemini, ChatGPT’s Atlas, and Perplexity’s Comet are all worth exploring.

Trend 7: Live Content Advantage
When everything can be AI-generated, being live on camera creates real trust. Nearly 30% of YouTube users watch at least one live stream every week. Very few brands are going live regularly, so there is a real opportunity here.

Trend 8: Language Is No Longer a Barrier
Tools like HeyGen can auto-dub your videos into dozens of languages using your own voice. Creators are getting 30 to 50% of their views from languages they don’t even speak.

Trend 9: Incognito Prompt Testing
Want to know how AI really ranks you? Open Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini in a fresh session and prompt it to forget everything it knows about you. Then ask it to recommend the best [your category] in [your city]. See where you land. This gives you the honest, unbiased answer instead of a result boosted by your personal data.

Your Step-by-step Action Plan

If this felt like a lot (it was!), here’s the simplified version of where to start:

1. Test your current AEO score. Go to aeo-test.ai and enter your website URL. Screenshot your results.
2. Add or improve schema markup. If you’re on WordPress, install Rank Math or Yoast. Fill it out completely, including FAQs. For a stronger result, hire a developer to hard-code your schema.
3. Create an llms.txt file. This tells AI tools to read your site. Your developer can add this in minutes.
4. Check your Cloudflare settings. If you use Cloudflare, make sure you haven’t blocked LLMs from crawling your site.
5. Clean up your NAP. Make sure your business name, address, and phone number are identical across every directory, listing, and profile.
6. Claim your Google Knowledge Panel. If you don’t have one yet, getting on 15 to 20 podcasts is one of the fastest ways to earn one.
7. Start building external validation. Claim or create profiles on Crunchbase, Wikipedia, industry directories, and relevant platforms.
8. Write a book (even a short one). The Amazon author page and Goodreads profile create high-authority external links.
9. Run the incognito prompt test. Search for your category and city in fresh AI sessions to see where you really stand.
10. Create micro-category content. Write for specific sub-niches in your industry, not just your broad topic. The more specific you are, the more AI cites you.

Ready to Grow Your Business with Confidence?

If you want to talk through how to apply any of these ideas to your specific business, or if you’re looking for support with your bigger entrepreneurial goals, I’d love to connect. I offer one-on-one entrepreneur coaching for those who are ready to grow with clarity, purpose, and a plan.

Book a free discovery call: calendly.com/Kalika