You’ve heard of word of mouth. You’ve probably relied on it a time or two.
Before you tried that new restaurant, you asked someone or someone told you about it. Before you hired that contractor, someone vouched for them or you checked Google Reviews. Before you booked that salon, you checked if your coworker’s hair looked good first.
That’s Aunt Janice. Every town has one. She knows everybody, she’s been everywhere, and when she recommends something, people listen. Not because she has a certificate. Because she’s earned it over time through consistency, presence, and being right enough times that her word means something.
Here’s what most small business owners don’t realize, and it starts with something called SEO.
The internet works the same way. And so does AI.
Let’s talk about three terms you’ve probably seen and maybe scrolled past.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization. Getting found on Google when someone searches for what you’re offering.
GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. Getting recommended by AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini when someone asks them a question instead of Googling it.
AEO: Answer Engine Optimization. Making sure your content directly answers the specific questions people are asking, so search engines and AI pull your content as the answer.
Three terms. See the pattern in them?
They’re all just trying to figure out who to trust.
When someone asks Google “what’s the best bakery in Chesapeake,” Google is doing exactly what Aunt Janice does. It’s consulting what it knows. What it’s seen repeatedly. What other people have said. What shows up consistently and looks credible.
When someone asks Claude “what’s a good small business consultant near me,” Claude is doing the same thing. Pattern-matching against everything it’s absorbed in knowledge such as websites, reviews, directories, blog posts, mentions, to figure out who deserves a recommendation. Aunt Janice has been collecting impressions for years through conversation and lived experience. Claude is relying on a hybrid approach of its training data, and real-time search. But the inputs that make either of them recommend you? Identical.
Consistency. Presence. Reputation. Real people saying real things about you in real places. A website that answers the right questions in plain language. A Google Business Profile that looks like it’s alive and thriving. Reviews that sound human because they are human. They’re the same trust signals but with a different recommender.
The most important part is that you can’t fake either one.
Aunt Janice knows when something feels off. She’s seen too much, heard too much, been burned too many times by things that looked good on paper. Her gut is calibrated. And so is Claude.
AI tools are getting increasingly good at detecting thin content, keyword stuffing, and the hollow ring of a business that exists on paper but not in practice. Just like Janice can tell the difference between a genuine recommendation and someone trying to sell her snake oil.
The businesses that show up in search, places like AI answers, in Aunt Janice’s recommendations, those are the ones that actually did the work. Over time. Consistently. In public.
So what does this mean for you practically?
It means the strategy is the same whether you’re optimizing for Google, for AI, or for word of mouth in your actual community.
Show up consistently. Answer real questions. Be findable in the places people look. Get real people to say real things about you. Find the type of person you want as a customer, even if that person doesn’t know the jargon yet, and speak directly to them.
Build the kind of presence that makes Aunt Janice nod and say, “yeah, I’ve heard good things about them.” The rest follows.
DataTabby helps small businesses build that kind of presence. Starting with understanding where you actually stand.