What is GEO, and does a small business need it?
GEO is making sure that when somebody asks an AI assistant for a business like yours, it can describe yours correctly. Most of the work is the same work that makes a site rank, done in a way a model can extract without guessing.
What does GEO actually mean?
Generative engine optimisation is structuring your website so a language model can find, read and correctly state facts about your business when somebody asks it a question rather than typing a search.
It is not a separate discipline bolted onto SEO. A page that loads fast, states facts plainly, marks them up with structured data and answers a real question is better for both. The genuinely GEO-specific parts are narrow: putting the answer immediately after the question rather than three paragraphs later, and making sure key facts appear as text rather than only inside an image or a PDF.
Why can AI assistants not describe my business?
Usually because the facts are not in a form anything can read: a menu that is a PDF, hours only in an image, a service list written as marketing rather than as statements, or no structured data at all.
The single most common failure we see is the PDF menu. It cannot be read on a phone, it cannot be indexed usefully, and an assistant asked what you serve has nothing to work from.
Does a small business need to do anything about GEO?
If customers find you by asking rather than searching, yes, and that share is growing. If your work comes entirely from referral and repeat custom, it matters much less, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.
The honest starting point is to check. Ask an assistant what your business does, what your hours are and what you charge, and see what it says. That answer is what a share of your prospective customers are being told.
Also asked
- Is GEO different from SEO?
- It overlaps almost entirely. The differences are structural: answer-first writing, facts as extractable text, and structured data. If somebody sells you GEO as a wholly separate service with a separate fee, ask exactly what they are doing that good SEO does not already cover.