The alphabet soup, settled
What GEO means for a local business
GEO is generative engine optimization: the work of being named or cited inside an answer that an AI writes. SEO is the older trade of ranking a page in a list of links. They overlap more than the people selling them admit.
Where the word came from
The term was coined in a November 2023 research paper from Princeton and Georgia Tech. The authors tested what makes a page more likely to be used in a generated answer and measured visibility gains of up to 40% from changes as plain as adding statistics, quotations and cited sources. That is why this page has numbers with links in every paragraph.
What is the same as SEO
The engines still have to reach your pages, read them, and trust them. Google's own guide on AI search says optimizing for it “is still SEO”. A fast site, pages about real services in real places, and honest links from others all still count. Google handles 89.94% of searches worldwide as of September 2026, and its AI answers draw on the same index.
What is different
The prize. A search page has ten links and the first takes 27.6% of clicks. A local AI answer names about two to four businesses and then stops. The same study of 200,085 answers found the Google Business Profile cited in 28.63% of them and business websites in 42% to 93% depending on the engine. So the website still matters, but the listing and what others say matter as much.
The measurement is different too. There is no rank to track. There is a question, asked of each engine, and an answer that either names you or does not. We ask that question every month and send the answer, named competitors and all.
The five things a local business does
- Let the crawlers in. Check robots rules and edge settings for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot. Cloudflare measured 1,091 crawls per referred visit for OpenAI's bots in 2025; if they cannot get in, nothing else matters.
- Say it plainly. One page per real service and place, with who, what, where, hours and prices in sentences, plus the machine-readable record behind the page.
- Claim the profile. Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple. Complete, consistent, with hours and photos.
- Earn the mentions. Reviews and third-party pages weigh more than your own claims. Ask every happy customer, every week.
- Answer the questions. Short pages written for the exact questions customers ask, in their words, with the answer first.
What this is not
It is not a trick, a plugin, or a number for “being in the training data”, which nobody can measure. Anyone selling that is selling theater. The honest version is the five steps above, checked each month against the real answer.
Questions people ask
- Is GEO the same as SEO?
- Mostly. Google's own guidance says optimizing for AI search is still SEO. The difference is the goal: not a high link on a page of ten, but being one of the two to four names a written answer says, and being cited as its source.
- Where did the word GEO come from?
- A 2023 research paper from Princeton and Georgia Tech coined generative engine optimization and measured visibility gains of up to 40% from changes like adding statistics, quotations and sources to a page.
- What does a local business actually do for GEO?
- Make the site readable to crawlers, state plainly who you are and where, claim and complete the Google Business Profile, earn reviews and mentions, and write short pages that answer the questions customers ask, in their words.