Last week I wrote about the landscape of AEO of late and the three kinds of AEO work: fidgety, tech foundation, and buyer-arc. Most people are only doing one. But those are about your website itself. There is a lot of AEO that's influenced off of your site, or as I like to joke, Out-of-site.

Google rankings and SEO for years have been about citations to gain rank. Now citations are to gain reputation.

Let's look at one out-of-site metric across four layers.

Position

When someone searches something very specific and local, like "plumber near me," Google's AI answers directly about 7% of the time. For broader local searches, like "best plumbers in Baltimore," that jumps to 68%. Either way, when AI answers, it's almost always pulling from your Google Business Profile.

There's a big annual survey of what actually moves local rankings, over a hundred factors ranked by real practitioners. Your website matching your Google Business Profile exactly sits near the top of that list. Matching every small directory site you're listed on sits way down near the bottom. Fix your own house first. The long tail of directories matters far less than people think.

And this isn't guesswork. Google's own documentation says outright that its AI answers pull from your Business Profile. That's Google telling you directly.

Velocity

Having your name, address, and phone number match everywhere used to be a nice-to-have. Now it's closer to a requirement. Get it wrong, and AI may not mention you at all when someone asks.

AI answers are starting to replace local search results instead of sitting next to them. The businesses with real detail on their profile, real reviews, real information, are the ones making it into that answer. The thin ones get skipped.

Acceleration

The old system rewarded patience. Reviews, backlinks, and a reputation built slowly over years.

The new system rewards freshness. Content less than three months old gets pulled into AI answers about three times more often than older content.

Jerk

This isn't a small tweak. It's a different game. Your Google Business Profile used to compete against ten blue links and a map. Now it competes to be the one answer AI gives, period.

The fields haven't changed. Posts, reviews, your business description, same as always. What changed is what they're being used for.

Five minute practice

Open your favorite LLM and ask:

"Search the web for [your business name] in [your city]. List every version of the name, address, phone number, and website URL you find, and where each one came from."

Build a table: source name, source URL, and what the name, address, phone, and website fields say there. Put your own website in as row one. Your Google Business Profile as row two. Everything else the AI found goes underneath.

Look at whether your own two rows agree with each other first, before you even get to the rest of the list.

This is one signal out of dozens we cover in the upcoming workshop. If you can't join the event that day, consider signing up for a niche report for your business and watch the recording.

Increase Your AEO Odds Workshop https://www.designrosetta.com/training-and-services

Best wishes,
Rose

Sources

• GBP as dominant citation source for local AI Overviews (7%/68%): Poster — https://www.poster.ly/guides/google-business-guide

• Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey (187 factors, 47 contributors): https://whitespark.ca/local-search-ranking-factors/

• Google's own AI features documentation: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features

• Entity consistency as a named citation requirement, local pack folding into the AI Overview: Digital Applied — https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/google-business-profile-guide-every-feature-2026

• Content freshness and AI citation likelihood, AirOps research: cited via Averi — https://www.averi.ai/blog/google-ai-overviews-optimization-how-to-get-featured-in-2026