Answer engine optimization sounds like a new discipline, so you have been reading about prompts and schema and waiting for someone to explain it properly. A mortgage broker ran the test and found the winners were using a page structure SEO people have run for over a decade.
He asked seven major AI platforms essentially the same question: who do you recommend to get a DSCR loan from in Knoxville, Tennessee. He picked that on purpose — he originates those loans and runs a website devoted to rental property financing, so he should have been competitive. He appeared in none of the seven.
What surprised him was who won. Some were large national lenders, others were brokers and specialty sites, and many had no connection to Knoxville at all. "They had published pages explicitly targeting searches like: DSCR loans in Knoxville, Tennessee. Then another for Nashville. Another for Chattanooga. Change the geography, adjust the page and repeat into the dozens, or hundreds."
His conclusion is that recommendation has two gates, and everyone is working on the second one. First: can the machine find you at all? Only then: does it have enough evidence to recommend you? One platform told him it could find little connecting his name to DSCR lending in Knoxville. When he supplied the context himself, it found the site, evaluated it and judged it relevant — meaning it had not rejected him in a comparison, it had never evaluated him.
Individual loan officers, he notes, have an identity problem. The one Knoxville-area broker who did surface had a profile page on his sponsoring company's site that plainly connected his name to investor lending, DSCR and fix-and-flip financing.
“They had published pages explicitly targeting searches like: DSCR loans in Knoxville, Tennessee. Then another for Nashville. Another for Chattanooga. Change the geography, adjust the page and repeat into the dozens, or hundreds.”
Agents have the identical problem in a worse form, because most of your public identity lives on a brokerage template that says your name, your phone number and nothing about what you actually do. There is no sentence anywhere on the web that connects you to a service and a place, so there is nothing to retrieve.
The fix is boring and it is available today. One page per service, per town, saying the thing plainly — and a profile page that names your specialty in words, not in a headshot. Being retrievable is not the same as being the best, which is the uncomfortable part and also the opportunity.