The questions customers ask AI assistants about your industry, and how to hear them

Questions decide the answer

Old marketing thought in keywords: two or three words typed into a box. Customers do not think that way when they talk to an assistant. They ask in full, honest sentences: "Who is a good dentist around here for someone who is nervous about dentists?" or "My air conditioner is blowing warm air — what does that usually cost to fix?"

An assistant can only recommend businesses it can describe. So the businesses that get named tend to be the ones whose websites answer those same questions plainly — in the customer's words, with real detail. That raises a practical question for you: which questions, exactly? You do not need a research firm to find out. The questions are already flowing through your business every single day.

Listen where the questions already live

• Your phone calls and front desk. The first thing a caller asks is, almost always, the question. Keep a simple log for two weeks — a notepad by the phone counts — and write down every "do you," "how much," and "can you" that comes in. Patterns show up fast, and a few questions will repeat so often you will wonder why they are not answered on your homepage.
• Your reviews. Reviewers describe, in their own words, what they cared about before they chose you. Read between the lines: the praise names the questions they had ("they could see me the same day," "the price was the price"), and the middling reviews name the doubts nobody answered in advance.
• Your inbox and contact forms. Written questions arrive word for word, exactly as customers phrase them. That phrasing is gold — it is the same language those customers use with an assistant.
• Your own team. The people who answer customers all day can recite the ten most common questions from memory. Ask them, and write down their answers too — those answers are usually better than anything written on the website.

Ask the assistants yourself

The second source is the assistants themselves. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and ask the questions a customer would ask — without putting your business name in them. "Best plumber in town for a water heater that stopped working." "Who offers evening appointments?" Ask the way a worried person asks at nine in the evening, not the way a marketer writes.

Then study the shape of what comes back. Which businesses get named, and what reasons are given for each one? Which websites does the assistant point to as its sources? Notice the follow-up questions it suggests, too — customers click those, so each one is another question your website should answer. You are not keeping score. You are learning what a convincing answer is made of in your market, straight from the thing doing the recommending.

Turn what you hear into answers on your website

Now the list you built becomes a writing assignment — a short one. For each question that kept coming up, your website should carry a plain answer that a person, or an assistant quoting you, can use:

• What it costs, or how your pricing works when an exact figure depends on the job.
• How soon you can usually do it, and what happens after hours.
• Where you serve, stated as plainly as customers state it.
• How booking works, step by step, in the order a customer experiences it.

Put the answers where they belong. A page of frequently asked questions is a fine home for the general ones, but the service page for that service should answer its own questions too — that is the page an assistant is most likely to be reading when your name comes up. Use the customer's words rather than your industry's words: if callers ask "can you come today," the page should say, in those words, whether you can. And keep the answers honest and current, because an assistant repeating your outdated price does you more harm than no mention at all.

Make it a habit, not a project

Questions change — with the season, with the neighborhood, with what people are worried about this year. So treat this as a short monthly routine rather than a one-time effort: skim the call log, read the new reviews, ask the assistants a few fresh questions, and fix the one answer on your website that looks thinnest. Half an hour, once a month.

That, in practice, is the heart of answer engine optimization — no tricks and no secrets, just hearing the real questions your customers ask and answering them clearly, in a place an assistant can find. The businesses that do this steadily become the businesses that get recommended.

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