Generative SEO · GEO
AI search is the new Google — and when it answers, it names a handful of businesses, not a page of links. Generative SEO makes sure you're in that handful. We optimize for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews the same way we optimize for the map pack: with measurable, honest work.
Why now
These numbers move by source and by month — treat them as the shape of a trend, not gospel — but the direction is unambiguous: AI search is growing, it converts, and almost no one is cited.
4.4×
AI-referred traffic converts vs. traditional organic
11%
of domains are cited by both ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews
30%+
year-over-year growth in AI search usage
The work
No buzzwords. Six concrete pieces of work, each one a signal a real AI engine weighs.
llms.txt is an emerging standard — a plain-text file at your domain root that tells large language models what your site is, what matters on it, and how to summarize you accurately. Think of it as robots.txt for the AI era, except instead of restricting crawlers it briefs them. We author a structured llms.txt that names your business, your services, your service area, and the canonical pages an AI should cite, so when a model ingests your site it leaves with the right facts instead of a guess. It's early, it's cheap, and almost no local competitor has one — which is exactly why deploying it now is worth doing.
Most websites silently block the bots that feed AI answers. A default robots.txt — or an aggressive security plugin — will often disallow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended without anyone realizing it. If those crawlers can't read your site, you simply cannot be cited, no matter how good your content is. We audit your robots.txt and server rules, explicitly allow the major AI crawlers, and confirm they can actually fetch your key pages. This is the single most common reason a perfectly good local business is invisible to AI search, and it's a fifteen-minute fix that unblocks everything else.
AI engines reason about entities — the real-world thing your business is — not just keywords. Entity optimization means building a consistent, machine-readable identity across the web: structured schema markup, a Wikidata entry where appropriate, consistent NAP, and clear relationships between your business, its services, and its location. The goal is a knowledge graph an AI can resolve confidently: when someone asks for "the best HVAC company in Meridian," the model should map that query to a well-defined entity it trusts — yours. This is the slow, compounding work that separates a business an AI mentions by name from one it never surfaces.
Platforms
They work differently, so optimizing for them isn't identical. Here's how each one answers, and what winning it takes.
How it answers
Answers from training data plus live web search, and increasingly from memory of a user's prior context.
What optimizing for it takes
Crawler access for GPTBot, citable passages it can pull during web search, and a clean entity it can resolve from memory.
How it answers
Citation-heavy by design — it shows its sources inline and links out to them, so being a named source drives real referral traffic.
What optimizing for it takes
PerplexityBot access, structured content it can cite cleanly, and authoritative mentions that make you a source worth pulling.
How it answers
Extracts and synthesizes from web sources at the top of the search page, above the classic results.
What optimizing for it takes
Measurement
The same philosophy as the geo grid: if we can't measure it, we won't claim it.
AI citability score
From geo-seo-claude — a baseline and a monthly trend.
Brand-mention count
Tracked across Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn over time.
AI-referred traffic
Isolated in Google Analytics as AI assistants pass referrals.
Citations in AI answers
Whether and how you're named in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.
Pricing
GEO optimization runs inside SEO Pro from months three to six, on the same engagement clock as your local SEO — so the foundation work serves both at once. Don't need full Local SEO? Standalone GEO is available for brands that just want AI visibility. Most local competitors don't even know what GEO is yet. That's the gap, and it won't stay open forever.
Try it right now
Ask ChatGPT for the best [your service] in [your city] and see who it names.
If it's not you, that's exactly where we come in. Run the test, screenshot the answer, and bring it to your discovery call.
FAQ
Book a discovery call and we'll run a free AI-visibility audit — we'll show you exactly how you appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews today.
Research consistently shows that brand mentions correlate with AI visibility more strongly than backlinks do — often cited at roughly three times the influence. AI models are trained and grounded on the open web, including Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, and forums, and they weight what real people say about a brand. We monitor where your business is mentioned across those surfaces, surface the gaps, and build a plan to earn authentic mentions in the communities your customers actually use. You can't fake this convincingly, and you shouldn't try — but you can be deliberate about earning it.
AI engines extract answers in chunks. A 150-word passage that fully answers one question — question, direct answer, supporting detail — is far more likely to be lifted into an AI answer than the same information scattered across a long, meandering page. We restructure your highest-value content into self-contained, citable passages of roughly 134–167 words, each one a complete answer a model can quote verbatim. This is the same format we use on this very site. It also happens to make the content better for humans, which is the tell of a real optimization versus a bot trick.
geo-seo-claude is our AI-visibility audit tool. It runs your business and category through the major AI engines the way a customer would, captures whether and how you're cited, scores your AI-citability, and tracks brand mentions over time. It's how we turn "are we showing up in ChatGPT?" from a vibe into a number you can watch move. We run a baseline audit at the start of an engagement and re-run it on a cadence, so GEO progress is measured the same way local SEO progress is measured with a geo grid — visibly, honestly, month over month.
Strong traditional SEO foundation, schema, and citable passages — AI Overviews lean heavily on the same signals that already rank you.