AI assistants now answer the questions your clients used to type into Google, and what they say about your business can be shaped. What that means for every business listed in the APSA directory.
There’s another Kristina Agustin. She lives in California, she’s done nothing wrong, and until earlier this year, if you asked an AI assistant about my name, she often came up ahead of me. My family collected screenshots of my outrage.
This sits squarely inside my profession. I’m trained in AI technologies and I deploy them for clients, so I know how the assistants decide what to say: what they read, what they trust, and what makes them cite one source over another. I decided to treat the namesake as a challenge to a digital duel, one she never knew she was in, and I turned the same tools I use for clients on my own business.
I wrote down, in one place, who Southern Sky AI is: the founding story, the credentials, the plain facts. I rebuilt my About page as the single page a machine can resolve my identity from, with everything else on the site pointing back to it. I brought every professional profile and directory listing into line with the same description, correcting years of small inconsistencies I’d stopped noticing. And underneath the words, I added the technical layer: structured data a machine can parse without guessing, a file at the root of the site pointing AI crawlers to the pages that matter, and headings phrased as the questions people ask, with the answer sitting directly underneath.
The results arrived within days. Google began returning clear, accurate descriptions of Southern Sky AI, and the assistants followed. Ask Gemini about my name today and I come up first.
What moved those results is a discipline called answer engine optimisation, AEO for short: making your business the source the AI assistants quote when someone asks a question you’re qualified to answer.
Search Is Becoming Answers
Traditional SEO was a ranking game. A search returned a list of results, people clicked through and compared, and the contest was for page one. Now AI answers sit on top of roughly a quarter of Google searches, and where they appear, the clicks that follow have fallen by around a third. That’s before you count the people who skip the search box altogether and ask ChatGPT.
When a captain, an owner’s representative or a charter broker asks an assistant to recommend a shipyard, an agent, a provisioner or a marina in the Asia-Pacific, what comes back is one synthesised answer, sometimes a short list. There’s no page two.
So the question your website answers has widened. It was always whether a person browsing could find you and trust you. Now it’s also whether the machine reading your site can find you, parse you and cite you. Most sites in our industry were built for one visitor, a person with a browser, comparing and clicking, and the good ones did that well. A second reader has arrived alongside that person, and it reads differently.
You’ve Already Seen This Working
APSA’s new website was rebuilt on these principles, and the association wrote about what happened next in APSA Launches Its AI-Forward Website. The site now handles over a million requests a month, most of it machines reading APSA content. When the AI engines first discovered the site, between a quarter and nearly half of all traffic came from AI assistants and crawlers, and in a single day ChatGPT’s crawler read more than 9,400 pages. ChatGPT now fetches APSA pages live, 100 to 200 times a day, to answer questions people are asking at that moment. In four days in late July, one in ten of those live fetches was a member’s individual directory listing, and AI systems read more than 100 of the 147 member listings in the same window. For human visitors, arriving from more than 100 countries since launch, the member directory is among the most-visited pages on the site.
“Every listing in that directory is a structured, machine-readable profile. When the machines read the site, and they do every day, your business is part of what they read.”
What an AEO-Informed Website Does
Four things, whether it’s a new build or a renovation of the site you have.
1. Entity clarity. One page a machine can resolve your identity from: who you are, what you’re qualified in, where you operate, what you offer. Everything else on the site points back to it, and the same facts appear wherever your business is described across the web, because models read what others say about you too.
2. Answerable pages. Each service gets its own page. Headings are phrased the way a client would ask, and a direct answer in plain words sits in the first lines underneath. The page that states an answer plainly is the page a model can quote.
3. Machine-readable markup. Behind the visible page sits structured data describing your organisation, your team and your services in a format machines parse without guessing. The content itself is present in the code the server sends, because AI crawlers read that and move on; they don’t wait around for scripts to load it afterwards.
4. Crawler access, verified. The site admits the AI crawlers by name, and the pages open fast enough that a crawler doesn’t time out and leave. Access deserves checking at every layer: on one engagement we found AI crawlers being silently blocked at the infrastructure level, above the website itself, while every setting on the site was correct. The owner could have checked every recommended box and never known the machines were being turned away a layer higher up.
What This Looks Like on Your Site
You don’t need to read code to take a first sounding. Open your site and consider:
- Does the first screen say plainly what you do and who you serve?
- Does each service have its own page, or do several share one?
- If a stranger read only your About page, could they say who you are, what you’re qualified in and where you operate?
- Are your headings the questions clients ask, with the answer directly underneath?
- Do the descriptions of your business match across your site, your LinkedIn profile and the directories that list you, including your APSA listing?
- Do your pages open within a couple of seconds on a phone?
Then ask an assistant two questions: “Who is [your name]?” and “What do you know about [your business]?” Whatever comes back is your starting position, in the machine’s own words.
Start With Your Listing
Your APSA directory listing already sits on a platform the AI engines read every day, so it’s the easiest first move you have: check that it says what your own website says, the same name, the same services, the same places. Consistency across the places you’re described is one of the strongest signals a model gets.
And if a namesake comes up ahead of you, you’ll know how I felt. The order can change; mine did.
Kristina Agustin is the Founder and Principal Digital Navigator of Southern Sky AI, helping maritime and professional organisations adopt AI with capability and good governance. Southern Sky AI designed and built APSA’s new website.