AI engines are answering your customers' questions. They should be citing you.

GEO is the work that makes you citable, not just rankable.

Classic SEO gets you into the top 10. GEO gets you cited from the top 10. AI engines retrieve pages from the search index and then apply a second filter: is this page structured well enough to quote? Pages with direct answers, clear entity signals, and question-shaped headings pass that filter. Pages without them often don't.

For Google, this means AI Overviews. For ChatGPT, it's live search answers via OAI-SearchBot. For Perplexity, it's the inline citations that accompany every response. For Claude, it's live web search. Each engine has a different retrieval model — but the core signals are the same: extract the answer, ground the entity, trust the source.

What we audit and fix

• Entity schema implementation. Organization or LocalBusiness schema with a complete sameAs array — Google Business Profile URL, LinkedIn, Wikidata where applicable. This is the single most leverage-efficient GEO action: it tells every AI engine exactly who you are and where you operate, so citations are attributed correctly.
• FAQPage schema on every informational page. FAQPage is the schema type AI engines are most likely to extract from. We deploy it on every service page and informational pillar, then validate with Google's Rich Results Test. Already recommended for classic SEO — in the AI era, it carries double weight.
• Content restructured for extractability. We rewrite H2s as full questions ("How long does a brand strategy engagement take?") and restructure each section so the answer comes in the first one to two sentences. Research (Princeton/Georgia Tech, 2024) found that roughly 44% of AI citations come from the first 30% of a page — the so-called "ski ramp" pattern. We front-load every page that's a citation candidate.
• robots.txt AI crawler audit. We verify that citation crawlers — OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot — are not blocked. A single misplaced wildcard rule can block all AI citations at once. We also document any intentional training-data blocks (e.g., GPTBot) so they don't inadvertently affect search-citation crawlers. These are different agent strings and must be managed separately.
• dateModified discipline. AI retrieval pipelines filter out stale pages before they get to the citation stage. We implement systematic dateModified updating in both the HTML meta and JSON-LD schema on a structured refresh cadence.
• AI visibility monitoring via Brand Radar. We set up ongoing monitoring in Ahrefs Brand Radar: monthly AI impression counts, share-of-voice vs. competitors in your category, and cited-page tracking. When a competitor's AI SOV spikes, we diagnose what drove it.

The local GEO advantage

National brands compete on entity strength — domain rating, Wikipedia presence, mass brand mentions. Local service businesses compete on extractability and GBP grounding. A business in Burnaby with DR 5, a complete LocalBusiness schema linked to its Google Business Profile, and neighbourhood FAQ content can outperform a national chain's local branch for queries like "best brand agency in Burnaby."

The reason: AI engines answering local recommendation queries look for a page that explicitly states the service, the city, and a concrete extractable fact — a price range, a timeline, a specific credential. Thin service pages with no specifics don't get cited. Adding one specific sentence to each service area page ("We complete most brand strategy engagements in 8–12 weeks, starting at $4,500, and work with service businesses across Metro Vancouver") materially improves citation likelihood.

How GEO fits with the rest of your SEO

GEO doesn't replace the other five pillars — it amplifies them. Schema markup is the foundation of entity grounding. Content architecture (neighbourhood pages, service pages) creates the citation candidates. Local SEO (GBP grounding, NAP consistency) is the primary local GEO signal for Google. GEO is the layer that makes all of those investments visible to AI engines, not just classic search.