When someone asks AI who’s best, make sure it says you.

Because your competitors gave the AI something to cite and you didn’t. Language models answer by pulling together the clearest, most specific, most machine-readable sources they can find on a topic. If a competitor’s site spells out services, prices, service areas, and answers to common questions in plain language with structured data behind it, the model has a reason to name them.

If your site is a stylish brochure with vague copy and no schema, there’s nothing for the model to lift. GEO closes that gap by giving the engines a clean, citeable version of your business.

The category is legit; a lot of what’s sold under the name is not. Real GEO is a real discipline: structured data, plain-language answers to the questions buyers ask, citeable specifics only your business knows, and letting AI crawlers reach your content. That genuinely changes whether AI engines can cite you.

What’s a scam is the rebadged rank-tracker or the “AI SEO” package that just stuffs keywords and charges more for the same old work. The test is simple — ask what they’ll actually change on your site and how they’ll measure whether AI engines start citing you.

No. AI Overviews and AI answers are earned, not bought — there is no ad slot that guarantees a mention. AI engines assemble answers from sources they can read and trust, so the way in is to be the clearest, most citeable source on the questions your customers ask.

You can pay an agency to do that work well and faster, but you’re paying for the optimization, not for placement. Anyone selling you a guaranteed spot in AI Overviews is selling something that doesn’t exist.

SEO optimizes to win a ranked list of blue links a person clicks through. GEO — and its close cousin AEO, Answer Engine Optimization — optimizes to be the source an AI engine cites inside a synthesized answer, where there often is no list and frequently no click.

They share a foundation (fast, well-structured, trustworthy pages) but the targets differ: SEO wants position one, GEO wants to be quoted. The strongest small businesses do both, because classic search and AI answers now sit side by side on the same results page.

Give the model something specific and machine-readable to work with. In practice that means: schema markup on every page so engines understand what your business is; plain-language answers to the real questions people ask, written under question-format headings; citeable specifics — prices, timelines, service areas, and numbers only your business can state; and an open door for AI crawlers like GPTBot so they can actually read it.

Then check your visibility monthly and keep feeding the gaps. That sequence is exactly the method we run for clients.

Four things, in order. First, structured data (schema) on every page, so engines can parse what you offer. Second, real answers to real questions — the ones your customers ask and the ones most sites in your industry skip. Third, citeable specifics: concrete numbers, prices, and timelines a model can quote with confidence.

Fourth, crawler access — a robots.txt that allows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended, plus an llms.txt that points AI to your best content. None of it is exotic; almost nobody does all four.

Every sign points to yes, and hard. Someone asking an AI engine “who’s the best plumber near me” is deep in buying intent — they’ve skipped the ten-blue-links research phase and asked to be handed a recommendation. When the AI names you, you arrive pre-vetted, which is why AI-referred visits are the highest-converting traffic we’ve measured.

Industry signals and our own tracking both point to a 3–5x lift over classic organic clicks. It’s early, so we report what we can verify rather than inflate it — but the direction is not in doubt.

Because SEO and GEO reward different things. Good SEO can rank you for a keyword while your page still gives an AI engine nothing quotable — no schema, no direct answers, no specifics it can cite, and sometimes a robots.txt that blocks AI crawlers outright.

Ranking is about being findable; GEO is about being citeable. If your SEO is solid, you’re most of the way there on the fundamentals — you’re usually missing the structured answers and the crawler access that let AI engines actually use your content.

It depends on the shape of your site and how much of the foundation already exists. A site with clean SEO and good content needs schema, structured answers, and crawler access layered on — a smaller lift. A thin or dated site needs the content built before it can be optimized.

We scope it against your actual pages rather than quote a one-size package, and for clients we run it as part of managed search rather than a bolt-on. The honest answer is that GEO is cheaper than most people fear and most valuable when it starts before your competitors’ does.

You can do a lot yourself — add schema, write question-format answers, open your robots.txt to AI crawlers. The parts that trip people up are knowing which questions your industry leaves unanswered, mining the citeable specifics only your business knows, and tracking whether AI engines actually start citing you month over month.

An agency isn’t buying you a secret; it’s buying the pattern recognition and the monitoring so the work compounds instead of stalling. If you have the time and appetite, start now. If you’d rather it just be handled, that’s the job we do.