Something has changed in how people find local businesses, and most owners have not fully caught up with it yet. The shift is not dramatic enough to make the news but it is consistent enough that if you run an appointment business and rely on search for any portion of your enquiries, it is worth understanding. More and more searches are ending not with a list of websites to click through, but with an answer. A direct, confident response from an AI tool that tells the searcher what they need to know and, increasingly, which businesses they should contact. If your business is not in that answer, the search happened and you were not part of it. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the practice of making your business easy for AI to find, understand and recommend. This post explains what that means in plain terms, what has actually changed in how customers discover services and what you need to do differently on your website and online presence to make it work.