Open ChatGPT on your phone and type the sentence one of your customers would type. “Best emergency plumber in Warrington.” “NHS dentist near me taking new patients.”
You get an answer back, and that answer names somebody. The question is whether it names you, and if it doesn’t, whether you have any idea why.
What is GEO sits behind that gap. GEO stands for generative engine optimisation, and it means getting your business named inside those AI answers rather than only inside a list of links. It is a genuine shift in how people find local services, not a new industry. As the research team at Ahrefs put it, this is still just SEO with a broader scope.
This guide covers what GEO is, how it differs from the SEO you may already pay for, whether AEO is a separate thing, why “near me” searches behave differently in AI answers, how to check your own visibility free in about twenty minutes, and one real client result. One caveat first: ordinary Google still brings in the bulk of local enquiries, and nothing below changes that.
GEO Explained: Generative Engine Optimisation in One Page
AI Overviews now appear on roughly a third of UK Google searches, up from about one in five at the start of 2025. That block of text above the results is not an advert and it isn’t a link. It’s an answer.
Generative engine optimisation (written “generative engine optimization” in American sources, same thing) is the work of getting your business named, described and cited inside answers produced by AI systems: Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude. Not ranked in a list of ten. Named in the answer itself.
Neil Patel has a useful way of framing the change. Old search handed you the phone book and left you to work through it. AI search behaves more like asking a friend who already has an opinion and names two or three businesses without waiting to be asked for a shortlist.
SEO gets you seen on the page. GEO gets you mentioned in the answer.
On a phone it looks like this. Somebody searches “best plumber near me” and gets a short paragraph naming two or three firms, a line of reasoning for each, a few small source links underneath, and the map pack pushed down the screen. Ask that same question in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Mode and the same business can come up in all three with entirely different sources cited each time.
Quick comparison. A search engine gives you a list and lets you choose. A generative engine gives you an answer and chooses for you.
GEO vs SEO: What Changes and What Stays Exactly the Same
You can rank in the local pack and still lose the call. The listing sits where it always has, but the AI Overview above it names a competitor. One practitioner puts the cost to the businesses left out at 80 to 100 calls a month.
What changes is the unit of visibility. SEO asks where you rank. GEO asks whether you get named at all, and how you get described when you are. Rank tracking answers neither, which is why owners are flying blind.
Visibility doesn’t travel either. Being recommended in ChatGPT doesn’t mean Gemini has heard of you: only 7 of the top 50 most-cited domains appear across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity alike, Ahrefs found.
What stays the same is most of the actual work. One practitioner audited 47 local businesses expecting a complicated new optimisation layer. The ones appearing in AI answers just had solid local SEO fundamentals and one specific gap closed.
The local pack still appears on 95.6% of genuine hire-intent trade searches. Dentists see the highest AI Overview rate of any local sector studied, 20.5% of queries, with the local pack still on 79% of them. AI search is where the growth is. Ordinary local search is still where the volume is, so anyone telling you to stop doing SEO is selling something.
The verdict: GEO is the same groundwork judged by a second scoreboard, on the same website, Google Business Profile, reviews and citations you already own. If an agency quotes GEO as a wholly separate product, ask which part of it isn’t local SEO.
What Is AEO, and Is It Different from GEO?
GEO, AEO, AI SEO, LLM SEO, SGE. Five acronyms describing largely the same work, at least two coined by people with something to sell. There is one real distinction buried in there, so here it is.
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It means structuring your content so a machine can lift a direct answer straight out of it: clear questions, clear answers, tidy formatting, no burying the point in paragraph six. GEO is the broader umbrella, covering everything that gets you mentioned and cited in a generated answer, including your reputation on websites you don’t own. In everyday use people swap the two terms freely and nothing is lost.
What is AEO in practice? A genuine FAQ block on a service page, answering the questions customers actually ask, in the words they ask them. Location pages under roughly 400 words with no FAQ were never cited in one audit of local AI visibility.
We cluster GEO, AEO and AI SEO under one service on our GEO page, because splitting them into three products would be inventing work.
So stop sorting the acronyms. Ask instead what is actually being changed on your website and your Google Business Profile.
Why Near Me Searches Work Differently in AI Answers
Gemini doesn’t run a separate algorithm for local businesses. Its AI Overviews pull from Google’s knowledge graph, the same infrastructure that has always decided your local pack position. It isn’t a different universe. It’s the same data your Google Business Profile already feeds, read back in sentences.
Which makes local GEO unusually tractable: you already control most of the inputs. That 47-business audit found four signals doing the deciding.
- Business type declared correctly in your site’s structured data. The most common error found.
- NAP consistency. NAP is your name, address and phone number, identical everywhere they appear online. 60% of the businesses audited had a mismatch, and most owners didn’t know.
- Review velocity. Recency beats volume: 80 reviews from the past year outperformed 200 spread over six years. With 97% of consumers reading reviews across an average of six sites, it isn’t a Google-only signal.
- Location page quality. More on that below.
Different assistants lean on different sources for the same query. ChatGPT favours directory sites, Gemini leans on Google Maps, and Google’s AI Mode pulls from awards, Facebook and press. UK equivalents are different websites, same principle. The constant is a complete, active Google Business Profile.
The location pages Gemini cited shared three traits: service descriptions specific to that area, a real FAQ, and genuine local context. Around 88% of local businesses are effectively invisible in AI search, while roughly 35% of consumers already use ChatGPT or Gemini to find local services. That’s a gap, not a threat.
Worth your attention if you serve a defined area and rely on enquiries. Skip it if you’re a national ecommerce brand, because almost none of these signals apply.
How to Check If AI Recommends Your Business (Free, About 20 Minutes)
You can answer the question this guide opened with tonight, for nothing, on your phone.
Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, and ask each the exact question a customer would ask. Then ask it three more ways, because wording changes the answer: “emergency electrician Widnes”, “who’s the best electrician near me”, “I need a rewire in Widnes, who should I call”. Run the lot again a few days later.
That last step is the one most guides skip. A single check is closer to a coin flip than a measurement: answers shift by phrasing, by session and by day. It tells you whether you’re in the conversation, not your exact standing.
The free alternative to paid GEO tracking is a fixed set of 50 buyer-style questions, run on each assistant, logged with the competitors who keep appearing, scored as a citation share and rerun every 30 days. Under 20% is a visibility problem, 20 to 40% is competitive, over 40% means you’re winning your category. Most score under 10% first time.
Profound and Peec AI automate it for around $300 a month, aimed at enterprises. A single-location business doesn’t need one yet.
Two free technical checks are worth doing. Google’s Rich Results Test takes about 15 minutes and confirms your site declares the right business type. Then spot-check your NAP across the main directories with Moz Local or BrightLocal, both free. Fix both and expect ranking movement in three to four weeks, and an AI Overview appearance around week six.
Start with the four-assistant check on your top three customer questions, and write down who gets named instead of you. That list is your real competitor set.
Does GEO Actually Bring In Work? One Real Result
Most GEO articles end on a hypothetical. You’ve probably also been sent an agency case study with a glowing paragraph and no numbers in it.
So here’s ours. One Local Magnet client went from 6 AI Overview appearances to 165, and became the #1 recommended local practice in ChatGPT. That’s the entire claim, with nothing bolted on that we can’t show you. Check it on the case studies page.
A separate published example shows what the work usually is. A five-city service business sat at local pack position 5 for over eight months and appeared in no AI answers. The audit found three faults: the wrong business type declared, three NAP mismatches including a phone number left over from a rebrand, and two location pages under 300 words.
Fixing those moved them to position 2 and produced a first AI Overview appearance within about six weeks, with no ad spend. Same groundwork, two payoffs.
The verdict: worth starting now, not an emergency, and a decent share of it you could do yourself given the evenings.
If you’d rather not, tell us what you do and where, and we’ll give you a straight answer on whether GEO is worth it for a business like yours. If we can’t help, we’ll say so.
FAQ
Do I need GEO instead of SEO?
No. They’re complementary. SEO still drives the large majority of local enquiries: the Google local pack appears on 95.6% of genuine hire-intent trade searches. GEO is a layer built on the same foundations, meaning your website, Google Business Profile, reviews and citations.
Is AEO the same as GEO?
In practice they’re used interchangeably. Where a distinction is drawn, AEO (answer engine optimisation) means structuring content so a machine can lift a direct answer out of it, while GEO is the broader umbrella for everything that gets you named. Ahrefs’ team calls both still just SEO, broader in scope.
How can I check my AI visibility without paying for software?
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude the exact question a customer would ask, in three or four phrasings, then repeat on another day. Answers vary run to run, so a single check is closer to a coin flip than a measurement. The thorough version uses 50 fixed queries, rerun monthly.
Does Gemini use different local ranking signals to the Google local pack?
No. Gemini’s AI Overviews pull from Google’s existing knowledge graph and the same trust signals that have always powered local pack rankings, not a separate algorithm. The upshot: your Google Business Profile is doing double duty, and work on it pays off in both places at once.
Why do near me searches behave differently in AI answers?
Local AI answers lean on Google Business Profile data, review recency and volume, and NAP-consistent citations across directories more than on pure proximity. For “best of” style local queries especially, authority signals outweigh how close you happen to be to the person searching.