What is Cumae?
The short definition
Cumae turns your business information — menus, products, services, locations, hours, specials — into a structured profile that approved external AI systems read directly.
It has three parts:
- A hosted discovery page. Structured, crawlable, and formatted for LLM consumption rather than for human browsing.
- An authoritative profile behind it. The deeper record of products, services, attributes, and locations that the page surfaces.
- Controlled access. Which AI systems may draw from it, and on what terms.
The point is authorship. Without a source of your own, AI systems assemble an answer about your business from whatever they can find — a stale directory entry, a third-party listing, a competitor’s description of the category. With Cumae, they have something better to read.
Why “Cumae” (“Cue-Me”)?
Cumae was home to the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient oracle whose recorded knowledge was preserved and consulted for guidance. CRSTBL Cumae follows a modern version of that idea: organizing authoritative information so it can be consulted reliably — this time by machines rather than petitioners.
It is pronounced Cue-Me.
Your website is indexed by Google. Is it indexed by AI?
When someone asks ChatGPT “where can I get good pad thai near me,” or asks Perplexity “which distributor carries industrial nitrile gloves,” those systems look for structured, accessible information about real businesses.
Most businesses — small ones, and plenty of large ones — have no structured presence in that layer. Their website content exists, but it isn’t formatted or accessible in the way AI systems need. The practical result is a business that is perfectly legible to a search crawler and effectively invisible to the systems its customers are actually asking.
What are AEO and GEO?
AEO (AI Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) describe the practice of making business information discoverable and usable by AI chatbots and large language models. They are the AI-era counterpart to SEO.
Just as SEO helps your website rank in Google, AEO and GEO help your business appear in AI-generated answers.
One difference is worth sitting with. SEO competes for a position in a list of links, where being tenth still means existing. AEO competes to be the source an answer is built from — and an answer either cites you or it doesn’t. There is no page two.
Cumae and your Google Business Profile
A Google Business Profile is table stakes: it gets your business into Google Maps and Search. But the AI ecosystem is much bigger than Google, and a GBP listing was never designed to feed it.
Google’s directory is designed for Google’s ecosystem. Networks like Uber Eats, DoorDash, Apple, and Amazon, along with independent LLMs, have every reason not to build on it.
Without a single source, keeping your menu, hours, and location details current means updating Google, Yelp, Facebook, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Apple Maps, and every industry directory separately — and they drift apart the moment you miss one.
Google Business Profile was built for a world where customers searched by keyword and clicked links. Cumae assumes customers ask questions and AI systems answer them.
Keep your GBP listing. Cumae is designed to complement it, not replace it.
Cumae and CRSTA: different jobs
CRSTBL builds two products that are easy to conflate. The distinction is direction:
- Cumae faces outward. It controls how external AI systems access your business information — the answers given about you somewhere else.
- CRSTA faces inward. It manages the AI conversations you have with customers directly, on your own site, kiosk, or app — the answers given by you.
They have different functions and can work separately or together. A business can publish an authoritative profile with Cumae and never deploy a conversation agent. Another can run CRSTA with no Cumae plan at all. Run together, the same information governs both what AI systems say about you elsewhere and what your own agent says to the customer in front of it. For the full picture of the agent side, see What is CRSTA?
What Cumae doesn’t do
A few honest limits worth naming:
- It doesn’t guarantee what an AI system will say. Cumae supplies an authoritative source. It cannot compel a model to use that source, or dictate how an answer is phrased.
- It isn’t a replacement for your website. The hosted page is a machine-readable companion to your site, not a new home page.
- It isn’t a directory listing service. The goal is not presence in more directories. It is one source those systems can read, maintained in one place.
Frequently asked questions
How do you pronounce Cumae?
“Cue-Me.” The name comes from the ancient site of Cumae, home of the Cumaean Sibyl.
Do I need CRSTA to use Cumae?
No. They are separate products with different functions and can be bought and used independently. Many businesses will want both, but neither requires the other.
Does Cumae replace my Google Business Profile?
No. Keep the listing. GBP covers Google Maps and Search; Cumae covers the wider AI ecosystem that has no reason to read Google’s directory. They are complementary.
Which AI systems can read my profile?
Approved external AI systems — access is controlled rather than open to anyone who crawls. The technology partners who consume CRSTBL business knowledge connect through defined access methods; see Platform Partners for how that side works.
How is this different from SEO?
SEO optimizes a web page so it ranks among links a person will click. AEO structures your business information so an AI system can use it as the basis of an answer. The two are complementary, and Cumae addresses the second.
Give AI systems something authoritative to read.
See how Cumae structures your business information for the systems your customers are already asking.