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Co-founder, Emerging Digital Partners
George co-founded Emerging Digital Partners in Eastbourne and built the AI Search & SEO Audit you are on now. He spent around twenty years in the UK IT channel before that, most recently running solution sales teams, and now splits his time between building websites and search tooling for EDP clients and taking AI products to regulated industries through the ETT Group, where he is Chairman and CTO. He writes about answer engine optimisation the way he practises it: test it, measure it, fix what is actually broken.
Most small business websites ask to be trusted without offering a single checkable reason. Anonymous posts, stock photos, no team page, no dates, no credentials, no named clients. A human visitor forgives that. An AI engine deciding whether to recommend you does not, because it has nothing to weigh.
Every large citation study in 2026 lands in the same place: AI engines lean on Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, LinkedIn, editorial sites and review platforms, and cite brand-owned pages far less than owners expect. A business whose only source about itself is its own website is asking to be taken on.
AI engines prefer recent sources and they show the dates. When they quote your three-year-old price or your discontinued service, the customer arrives with the wrong expectation and you look careless. Stale content used to cost you rankings slowly. Now it costs you trust instantly.
A 2026 analysis found 44 percent of ChatGPT citations came from the first third of the cited page, and only around 15 percent of retrieved pages were cited at all. Warming up for four paragraphs before saying anything is not a style choice any more. It is the reason your competitor gets quoted.
AI engines do not rank your pages. They build a model of your business from everything they can find and decide how confident they are in it. When your name, description and facts differ from platform to platform, that confidence collapses, and an engine only recommends what it is confident about.
'We deliver innovative solutions that empower your business.' An AI engine reads that and learns nothing it can use. The vague-copy problem was tolerable when a human read past it to the contact form. It is fatal when the reader is a machine deciding whether to recommend you.
You do not need an agency to find out why AI engines are not recommending you. This is the exact half-hour checklist we run before any deeper work: access, rendering, entity, answers, schema, freshness and footprint. Most sites fail two or three of the seven, and they are usually fixable in a week.
When an assistant recommends a business, it is quoting a service page. Most service pages give it nothing to quote: no price, no scope, no location, no proof. Here is the nine-part structure that turns a service page into the source an engine uses.
AI assistants now answer 'what should I buy' with specific products, prices and links. They get that data from feeds, structured product pages and reviews, not from your homepage. Here is what an online shop needs in place to be one of the products named.
AI engines prefer recent sources, and several 2026 analyses found recently updated pages cited several times more often than stale ones. Changing the date is not an update. Here is a refresh system that keeps your best pages current without rewriting the site every quarter.
Every 2026 citation study says the same thing: AI engines lean on Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, LinkedIn, editorial sites and review platforms, and under-cite brand-owned pages. You cannot publish your way out of that on your own site. Here is how to earn the mentions that count, honestly.
Most FAQ pages are a list of questions the marketing team wishes customers asked. AI engines ignore them. FAQs built from the questions people really ask, answered fully in plain HTML, are among the most quoted pages on a small business site. Here is how to build one.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode for a plumber, dentist or accountant in their town, the answer names two or three businesses and stops. This is how a UK local business gets onto that shortlist: profiles, consistency, reviews, pages with real detail, and a monthly check.
AI engines do not rank pages about you; they build a model of who you are from everything they can find. If your name, description and facts differ from place to place, that model is fuzzy and you get skipped or misdescribed. This is how to fix it in a fortnight.
AI engines lift passages, not pages, and they lift from the top. A 2026 study found 44 percent of ChatGPT citations came from the first third of a page. Here is how to structure a page so the quotable part is where the engine looks first.
Perplexity searches the live web for almost every question and shows numbered citations, which makes it the fastest AI engine to test against and the most literal about matching what the user typed. Here is how to earn those citations.
ChatGPT recommends businesses from two places: what it learned in training and what it finds when it searches live. You can influence both. This is the practical plan we use with clients, with realistic expectations about how long it takes.
Google published its own guidance on optimising for AI Overviews and AI Mode in May 2026. Most of the advice being sold contradicts it. Here is what Google actually says, and the practical steps that follow from it.