Type "bakery near me" today and there's a good chance you never scroll past Google's AI Overview or the Maps pack — let alone ask ChatGPT or Perplexity directly instead of opening a search engine at all. If your business isn't built for that, you're invisible to a growing share of your customers before they ever see a list of websites.
What is GEO?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of structuring a website so AI systems — ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini — can understand it, trust it, and cite it when answering someone's question. It's the AI-era equivalent of SEO, and increasingly just as important.
How is it different from regular SEO?
They overlap a lot — a fast, well-structured, mobile-friendly site helps both. What's specific to GEO:
- Direct, self-contained answers. AI engines lift short, clear passages that answer a full question on their own — not paragraphs that require reading the whole page for context.
- Structured data (schema.org). FAQPage, Article, LocalBusiness markup tells AI systems exactly what your content means, not just what it says.
- Being explicitly crawlable by AI bots. Many sites accidentally block GPTBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended in robots.txt — making them invisible to AI search entirely, without anyone noticing.
- An llms.txt file. An emerging standard — a plain-text summary of your site built specifically for AI crawlers to read quickly.
- A complete Google Business Profile. Hours, categories, photos and reviews feed both Google Maps and AI Overviews directly — it's one of the highest-leverage things a local business can do.
Why this matters more every month
Local, intent-driven searches — "plumber near me," "bakery near me," "best contractor in Toronto" — are exactly the kind of query AI answer engines now handle directly. A business with no structured data, a robots.txt accidentally blocking AI bots, and an empty Google Business Profile simply doesn't exist in that conversation, no matter how good the business itself is.
What this looks like in practice
Every website I build now includes GEO fundamentals from day one: schema.org markup on every page, FAQ content written to be directly quotable, an llms.txt file, a robots.txt that explicitly welcomes AI crawlers, and a clear path to a complete Google Business Profile. It's not an add-on — it's part of what "a website" means today.
Want to know where your current site stands? Tell me about your business and I'll take a look.