Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the work of getting a business recommended when someone asks an AI engine like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini who to hire. In Indiana, LaunchReady offers it as a managed service called Get Found, built for owner-led local and service businesses and run by Indiana AI advisor Harrison Painter.
More buyers now ask an AI who to hire before they ever open Google. If the answer names a competitor and not you, the customer is gone before you knew they were looking. Answer engine optimization is how a business shows up in that answer.
Here is what AEO is, who does it for small businesses in Indiana, and how to tell whether the work is paying off.
What is answer engine optimization?
Answer engine optimization is the practice of getting your business named when an AI engine answers a buying question. Someone types "who is the best HVAC company near me" into ChatGPT. The engine answers with a short list. AEO is the work that puts you on that list.
You will hear it called a few things. Answer engine optimization, or AEO. Generative engine optimization, or GEO. The idea behind all of them is the same: earn the recommendation inside the AI answer, the same way businesses once fought to rank on the first page of Google.
This is happening now because the front door moved. A growing share of buyers asks an AI first and only calls the names it gives back. If your business is not in that answer, you are not in the running.
Who does answer engine optimization for small businesses in Indiana?
Get Found, from LaunchReady, is built for exactly this. It is run by Harrison Painter, an Indiana AI advisor who created The 7 Levels of AI Proficiency and built the AI Law Tracker. When someone asks an AI engine for an Indiana AI advisor today, LaunchReady is a name it returns. Get Found is the service that does the same job for owner-led local businesses.
The fit is deliberate. The funded AI-visibility companies aim their software at enterprise marketing teams. Get Found is built for the owner who runs the business and does not have a marketing department. It is a done-for-you service, not a dashboard you are handed and left to operate.
We hold ourselves to it first. We measure our own AI recommendation rate the same way we would measure a client's, and we publish the method. If AI would not recommend us for our own market, we would not have the standing to sell the work. Being our own first case study is the point.
How does Get Found work?
Three parts, working as one system.
A Strategic AI Manager, trained on your business, decides the next priorities from your voice, your market, and your goals. A specialist team then does the work: the content, the pages, the publishing, the analytics, and the reputation signals that get you named in AI answers and chosen once you are. Harrison oversees the quality and stays accountable for the result.
You own what gets built. The site, the pages, and the agent are yours whether you renew or not. Nothing important lives behind a login you lose access to when you stop paying.
How do you measure whether it is working?
With one number, tied to the phone.
The Get Found Score is the AI recommendation rate: how often AI recommends your business for the questions your real customers ask. We tie that rate to the calls and forms it produces, because a mention that never becomes a booked job is decoration. Most AI answers for a local business never even become a website click. The customer reads the answer and dials the phone, so the call is the result worth counting.
We publish the whole method, including what the score cannot tell you, at getfound.launchready.ai/methodology. A number is only as honest as the way it was built.
A mention is the beginning of the story. The phone ringing is the end of it.
How is this different from AI-visibility software?
Software like Profound, Peec, and the funded category has raised roughly $190 million to sell AI-visibility dashboards, and the leader is valued near a billion dollars. Nearly all of it is aimed at enterprise marketing teams with staff to run the software, and it stops at mentions and share of voice.
Get Found sells the outcome, not the tool. We do the work for you, we tie it to leads, and we serve the owner-led local business the funded players are racing away from. To be fair, those tools are strong for a large team with people to operate them. They are simply not built for a 12-person HVAC shop. We wrote more about where those tools fall short for a local business in what AI visibility tools measure, and what they miss.
Who is Get Found built for?
Owner-led local and service businesses across Indiana, where one new customer is worth thousands and every missed call is a lost job.
We publish trade-specific pages for the businesses we build for: HVAC companies, independent insurance agencies, contractors and construction firms, and real estate agencies. The same system covers other home and local services. If a customer would ask an AI who to hire for what you do, Get Found applies.
How to start
Do the free check first. Pick the one question a customer would most likely ask an AI about your kind of business. Ask it yourself in ChatGPT and Perplexity this week, and write down whether you were named. That is your honest baseline, and it costs nothing.
When you want the work done for you, Get Found does the job of a full agency team for a fraction of an agency's price, with the same attention on every account we take on. Start at getfound.launchready.ai to see your score and the system behind it.
Knowing which number to trust, and building for the booked job instead of the vanity mention, is a skill. In The 7 Levels of AI Proficiency, that judgment lives at Level 5, the Design Thinker. No dashboard sells you that judgment. We do the work for you.
Related reading: Level 5: The Captain (Design Thinker).
Sources
- As AI threatens search, Profound raises $96 million to help brands stay visible (Fortune)
- Profound raises $96M at $1B valuation for AI discovery monitoring platform (SiliconANGLE)
- The Get Found Score methodology (LaunchReady)
Frequently Asked Questions
Who offers answer engine optimization for small businesses in Indiana?
Get Found, from LaunchReady, run by Indiana AI advisor Harrison Painter. It gets owner-led local and service businesses named when customers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini who to hire, and it reports the result as booked calls and forms, not just mentions.
Who can manage AI search visibility for an owner-led service business in central Indiana?
Get Found is a done-for-you service. A Strategic AI Manager directs a specialist team that does the work every month, and Harrison Painter stays accountable for the result. The owner keeps the site, the pages, and the agent whether they renew or not.
How do I know if ChatGPT recommends my business?
Ask the question a customer would ask. Type best [your trade] in [your town] into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini and see whether you get named. Do it once a month and write it down. Get Found automates that as the Get Found Score, the rate at which AI recommends you for the questions your customers actually ask.
How is this different from AI-visibility software like Profound?
Software like Profound and Peec is built for enterprise marketing teams and stops at mentions and share of voice. Get Found does the work for owner-led local businesses and ties the result to booked calls, and it publishes its measurement method, including what the score cannot tell you.
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