SEO & GEO (AI Answer Engines)

GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of getting your business quoted inside AI-written answers — in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude — rather than ranked in a list of blue links.

The difference is what each one rewards. Search engines rank pages, so SEO optimizes a page to be chosen. Answer engines synthesise a response from sources, so GEO optimizes a page to be quotable: a clear question, a complete answer in the first sentence, structured data that tells the machine what it is looking at, and consistent facts about your business everywhere else on the web.

They share the same technical foundation. A site that is broken for Google is broken for ChatGPT too.

It matters now for a specific and growing slice of buyer research, and anyone claiming precise numbers about it is guessing. The honest position is that a meaningful number of buyers now open an AI assistant instead of a search box for the early questions — who does this, what does it cost, who is good in this area — and that share is going up, not down.

What makes GEO worth doing early is that the work is not speculative. Answer-first structure, FAQ schema and clean entity data improve your traditional search results at the same time. There is no version of this where you do the work and it only pays off if a prediction comes true.

By testing it. AI visibility tracking runs fifteen to twenty real buyer prompts every month across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude and records whether you appear, in what position, and which competitor got named instead.

That produces three numbers over time: your position, your share of voice, and the gap to whoever is being cited ahead of you. It is reported honestly, including the months where the answer is 'not yet'.

llms.txt is a plain-text file placed at the root of a website that tells AI systems what the site is, what it covers and which pages carry the authoritative answers — roughly what robots.txt does for crawlers, but aimed at language models.

It is part of GEO foundation work. On its own it is not a ranking lever, but it removes ambiguity about what your business is and which page answers which question.

Technical fixes can move things in weeks. Content and authority work generally takes three to six months to produce a readable trend, and competitive terms take longer than that.

Go in with that expectation rather than a thirty-day one. Anyone promising first-page rankings in a month is either targeting terms nobody searches or is about to do something that gets the site penalized.

Local SEO is the work of appearing when somebody nearby searches for what you do — the map pack, the local results, 'near me' queries. If customers come to you or you travel to them, you need it.

It covers Google Business Profile optimization and weekly posting, citation consistency so your name, address and phone number match everywhere they appear, and a review flow that produces reviews rather than hoping for them. One location is included in every SCM package; additional locations are quoted per location.

No, and neither can anyone else. Search rankings are set by algorithms nobody outside those companies controls, against competitors who are also working on it.

What can be committed to is the work: the technical errors get fixed, the pages get built to answer real queries, the schema gets deployed, the content ships on cadence, and the results get reported honestly every month. An agency guaranteeing a specific position is telling you something about their honesty, not their ability.

A monthly crawl of the whole site, a tagging sweep across alt text, heading order, meta descriptions and anchor text, schema validation, a check that digital assets were uploaded correctly, one page restructured to answer-first format, and a plain-English fix log showing exactly what changed.

It is included in every package. Websites break continuously — a plugin update, a new page from a staff member, an image uploaded without alt text — and the point of a monthly program is catching that in weeks rather than at the next annual audit.

Yes, if you want to be understood correctly by both search engines and AI assistants. Schema is structured data that states plainly what a page is — a business, a service, an FAQ, a location, a review — instead of leaving the machine to infer it from the copy.

It is one of the highest-leverage technical items available because it is cheap to deploy, it does not require new content, and it directly affects how rich results and AI citations get generated.

Answer-first means the complete answer to the question appears in the first sentence, before any context, background or setup. The page you are reading is built that way.

It matters because both a skim-reading human and a language model extracting a citation take the opening line. A page that spends three paragraphs warming up before answering gets skipped by the first and mis-quoted by the second.

Two a month is a real cadence for most local businesses; four to six is appropriate when you serve several distinct industries or compete in a crowded market. SCM packages include two, four and six pieces per month respectively.

Volume matters far less than mapping. Each piece should be pointed at a specific industry and a specific stage of the buying decision. Twelve unfocused posts a month will lose to two that answer the question a buyer actually typed.

Yes — most of the time that is exactly the situation. The monthly audit program, remediation sprints and technical SEO work are all designed to be run against an existing site, whoever built it.

The audit comes first either way, because fixing a site without documenting what is wrong with it is how agencies end up billing for work nobody can verify.