A customer in Accra wants a supplier. Two years ago they typed a query into Google, looked at a page of blue links and clicked two or three. Today a growing share of them ask an assistant instead, in full sentences, and read one answer that names two or three businesses.
If your business is not in that answer, the customer never learns you exist. There is no second page to be on.
We call the practice of being correctly represented in that answer Prompt Engine Optimization, or PEO. It is a term we coined at BVM because the existing vocabulary did not describe the work.
PEO is not SEO with a new name
The two overlap, and good SEO helps. But they optimise for different things, and confusing them produces work that does not pay.
- SEO optimises for ranking. The output is a position in a list. The user then chooses. Success is a click.
- PEO optimises for representation. The output is a sentence somebody else writes about you. The user usually does not choose from a list at all. Success is being named, and named accurately.
The consequences of that difference run deep. In SEO you can compete on volume: more pages, more keywords, more backlinks. In PEO, volume works against you. A model synthesising an answer is looking for clear, consistent, verifiable statements. Twenty thin pages saying slightly different things about your business make you harder to describe, not easier to find.
SEO rewards presence. PEO rewards coherence.
The three things a model needs from you
An assistant answering a question about your category is doing something specific: assembling a claim it can stand behind. To be included, you have to make that easy.
1. Clear statements of fact
Models work with propositions. "BVM Digital builds websites, does SEO and PEO, and runs AI consulting for Ghanaian SMEs" is a proposition. "We take your business to the next level" is not a proposition, it is decoration, and it carries no information a model can use. Marketing language that says nothing checkable is invisible to this channel.
2. Structure the machine can read
Structured data is how you hand a model facts without asking it to infer them from prose. Organization, Product, FAQPage and Person schema are not technical housekeeping, they are the format in which your business becomes machine-legible. An FAQ page with proper FAQPage markup is the single highest-value PEO surface most businesses can build, because it pairs a real question with a direct answer, which is exactly the shape of the thing the model is trying to produce.
3. Consistency everywhere you appear
This is the one most businesses fail. If your site says a product is launching soon, your FAQ says it is live, and your social profile says something else again, you have not given a model three sources. You have given it a contradiction, and the safe response to a contradiction is to leave you out of the answer entirely.
Consistency of facts across every surface you control is worth more than any single piece of clever content.
Why this matters more in Ghana than in most markets
Two conditions make this urgent here rather than interesting.
The first is that Ghanaian businesses are thinly documented online. Where a competitor in a mature market has directory entries, press coverage and reviews accumulated over a decade, a Ghanaian SME often has a Facebook page and a phone number. A model has almost nothing to work with. That is a problem, and it is also the opportunity: the businesses that publish clear, structured, consistent information now become the default source for their entire category, because there is nothing else to cite.
The second is behavioural. With 24.3 million internet users and 77 percent of traffic arriving on a mobile device, the assistant is on the same phone as WhatsApp, where 91.8 percent of those users already spend their day. The distance between asking a question and messaging a business is one screen. The businesses that get named will absorb an outsized share of that traffic.
What to actually do
PEO work is unglamorous and mostly consists of removing ambiguity.
- Write down what your business does in plain, checkable sentences. What you sell, who you sell it to, where you operate, what it costs, what is available today versus what is coming.
- Publish a real FAQ. Not six questions written for the sales funnel. The actual questions people ask, answered directly, with FAQPage schema attached.
- Add structured data to every page. Organization on the site, Product or SoftwareApplication on product pages, Person for the people who lead it.
- Audit for contradictions. Read your site, your FAQ, your listings and your profiles as one document. Every place they disagree is a place you are asking a model to guess.
- Publish a plain text summary at /llms.txt. A short, factual map of your site and what your organisation is. It costs an hour and it is read by exactly the crawlers you are trying to reach.
None of this replaces SEO. Google still sends traffic and will for years. But the share of decisions made inside an answer rather than a results page is only going one direction, and the businesses that get described accurately in those answers will be the ones that made themselves easy to describe.
That is the whole discipline. Be legible, be consistent, be checkable.