Something quietly broke in how people find businesses.
Nobody announced it. There was no headline. But somewhere in the last two years, millions of people stopped searching and started asking. They ask ChatGPT where to eat tonight. They ask Perplexity which coffee shop is actually worth going to. They ask Gemini what's good nearby. They ask Claude for the honest recommendation.
And AI answers. Confidently. Immediately. With specific names.
Here's the part that should worry you: most brands have absolutely no idea this is happening. They're still pouring money into Google Ads. Still doing the same SEO playbook from 2018. Still measuring success by where they rank on page one. Meanwhile, a growing wave of their customers are making real decisions - where to eat, where to shop, where to go - based entirely on what AI tells them.
That's why we started Hedgehog AEO.
The gap we saw.
We looked at the companies building tools for this space - Profound, Anteater, CrowdReply - and noticed something strange. Every single one of them was built for tech companies selling to other tech companies. Dashboards full of metrics. Visibility scores. Prompt volume analytics. Citation tracking.
Brilliant tools. Built for the wrong people.
The brands that need this most - the coffee roasters, the bakery chains, the barbershops, the restaurants, the hotels - they don't want a dashboard. They don't want to learn what "GEO" stands for. They don't want another login to forget about. They want someone to just make it happen.
So that's what we built. Not a platform. Not a tool. An agency. Real people doing careful, deliberate work on your behalf. We handle the strategy, the execution, the monitoring, and the reporting. You don't touch anything. You just start showing up in places you never showed up before.
What we believe.
AI search is the single biggest shift in how customers discover businesses since Google itself. And right now, the vast majority of brands are completely asleep on it.
We believe the brands that move first will build an advantage that compounds. Every mention we place today keeps driving AI recommendations a year from now. Every Reddit thread, every editorial feature, every review - it all stacks. The brands that wait will spend twice as much to catch up to competitors who started six months earlier.
We believe this work has to be done by people, not software. AI search is nuanced. It's about genuine conversations in real communities. Real editorial coverage from real publications. Thoughtful, authentic presence building that earns trust over time. You cannot automate that. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a bot that'll get your accounts banned.
We believe in showing every piece of our work. Every month, you see exactly what we did, what changed, and what's next. No black boxes. No jargon. No "trust us, the algorithm is working." Just clear, honest results you can see with your own eyes.
What we do.
Five pillars. All done for you.
- 1Community presence building. We get your brand mentioned across Reddit, Quora, Facebook, and every community platform AI pulls from - through a network of trusted, established accounts with real history and real credibility.
- 2Local media and web coverage. We get you featured in local media, editorial roundups, and "best of" articles - the kind of content that Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite as their primary sources.
- 3Google Business Profile + website optimization. We optimise your GBP and website so AI crawlers can find and understand your business instantly - not eventually.
- 4Review velocity and sentiment management. We manage your reviews because AI reads the actual words and uses them to decide whether to recommend you or your competitor.
- 5Bing Places optimization. We claim and optimise your Bing listing, because ChatGPT's entire search runs on Bing - and almost nobody has figured this out yet.
Who this is for.
Brands that people discover through recommendations. Coffee shops, bakeries, restaurants, barbershops, hotels, fitness studios, salons, retail chains - any business where someone might ask "what's the best [you] near me?" We work with single-location independents and hundred-location chains. If your customers find you through word of mouth, we make sure AI is part of that conversation.
Who we are.
We're a deliberately small, focused team that does one thing and does it exceptionally well. We're not a full-service marketing agency. We're not an SEO shop with GEO bolted on as an upsell. We don't do social media management or paid ads or brand strategy or any of that.
We get your brand recommended by AI. That's all we do. And we're very, very good at it.