More of your customers are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for recommendations before they ever open Google. We make sure your business is the one those tools mention.
GEO stands for generative engine optimization — getting your business mentioned, quoted, or recommended inside the answers AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity generate. AEO stands for answer engine optimization — a closely related practice focused on structuring content so it can be pulled directly into a short, spoken-style answer, including Google's AI Overviews, the AI-written summary that now sits above regular search results for many queries.
Traditional SEO is about ranking a page so a person clicks through to your website. GEO and AEO are about being the source an AI model draws from when it writes its own answer — often without the user ever clicking a link. If that's your business, you get the customer; if it's a competitor's, you don't even know you lost the chance.
The two disciplines overlap heavily in practice. Clean, well-structured content and technical markup that machines can parse help with both. But AI models weigh some things differently than Google's ranking algorithm — they favor content that answers a question completely in a short span of text, and lean on structured data and third-party sources, like your Google Business Profile, more heavily than a typical Google ranking does.
A growing share of local searches now start in an AI chat window instead of a search bar. Someone new to a neighborhood asks ChatGPT for "a reliable plumber near me open on weekends." None of these searches touch a traditional Google results page the way they used to — the AI does the comparing and summarizing on the searcher's behalf.
Google itself has leaned into this shift with AI Overviews, which now appear on a large share of local searches, often pushing traditional blue links further down the page. If your business isn't part of the source material an AI Overview draws from, you're invisible at the exact moment someone was ready to choose. This isn't a future trend — it's already changing which businesses get chosen this month.
AI models don't rank businesses the way Google ranks web pages. They generate an answer by pulling from sources they consider reliable and easy to parse. A few factors separate businesses that get mentioned from the ones that don't:
Clear, structured information. Pages that state facts plainly — services offered, service area, hours, pricing ranges — are easier for a model to extract and quote accurately than pages full of marketing language with the actual facts buried.
Schema markup. This is schema markup that makes your pages quotable — hidden code that labels your content in a standardized format machines understand. It doesn't change what a visitor sees, but it gives AI models and search engines a precise version of your information to draw from instead of having to guess.
Consistent information across the web. AI models cross-reference multiple sources. If your business name, address, phone number, and services are stated the same way on your website, your Google Business Profile, and major directories, that consistency builds confidence.
Third-party validation. Reviews, directory listings, and mentions on other reputable sites act as evidence that your business is real, active, and trusted by other people — not just self-reported claims on your own site.
Here's what we do. We start with an AI visibility audit, running real customer questions against ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews to see whether, how, and how accurately your business comes up — and how you compare to competitors who do. From there, we add or correct schema markup across your site so the facts about your business are in a format AI models and search engines can read cleanly, working alongside our on-page SEO service.
We also rewrite or add pages that answer the specific questions your customers are asking AI tools, built to be easy for a model to extract: direct answers, clear structure, no fluff. Alongside that, we build out and correct an accurate, fully built Google Business Profile and the directory listings AI models cross-reference, so every source tells the same story. Because AI models update frequently and what got you cited last quarter can change, we re-test on an ongoing basis and adjust as the landscape shifts — this isn't a one-time setup, it's a standing part of how your business stays visible.
AI visibility doesn't show up in the tools most agencies already use, so we built ours around it directly. Each reporting period, you see which real customer questions surface your business across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, what the AI actually said about you, and how that compares to a month earlier. We track this alongside your traditional SEO metrics so both channels move together in one report, not two disconnected ones.
We work with businesses across New York State, from Long Island and New York City to Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. AI search optimization benefits from local grounding just as much as traditional local SEO does — a locksmith in Suffolk County and a locksmith in Erie County are answering different local questions, and we build content and structured data to reflect that, not generic, one-size-fits-all copy.
Our blog covers how local New York businesses get recommended by ChatGPT and what AI search means for NY businesses in more depth. This page is where that gets turned into an ongoing engagement we manage for you.
No. Google rankings and AI assistant citations are built from different signals. Ranking well on Google means your page is well-optimized for that search engine's crawler and algorithm. Being cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity means an AI model chose your content as a trustworthy source to summarize or quote when answering a question. A page can rank on page one of Google and never get mentioned by an AI assistant if it lacks clear, structured, quotable information.
ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews (the AI-generated summary that now appears above regular search results), Perplexity, and Gemini are the ones we see driving real traffic and inquiries to local businesses today. Claude is used more for research and less for local recommendations right now, but we optimize for it too since that's shifting quickly.
No, and be skeptical of anyone who tells you otherwise. There is no ad program where you buy a citation in ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews. The only way in is by having content and data about your business that the AI model considers accurate, well-structured, and worth citing. That's earned, not bought, which is exactly the work we do.
We run structured queries against the major AI assistants on a regular schedule, log whether and how your business appears, and track that alongside your competitors. You get a month-to-month report showing which questions surface your business, what the AI actually says about you, and how that's trending over time.
You need both. Traditional Google search still sends the majority of buyer traffic for most New York businesses, and it isn't going away. AI search is a growing, additional channel layered on top of it. Good AI search optimization work overlaps heavily with good SEO work, so investing in one strengthens the other rather than competing with it.
It varies more than traditional SEO timelines because AI models retrain and update their sources on different schedules. Some clients see citations begin appearing within 60-90 days once schema markup, structured content, and profile data are in place; broader, consistent visibility across multiple AI assistants typically builds over several months.
Being cited by an AI assistant once isn't the same as staying cited. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity retrain and re-source their answers on their own schedules — a business that showed up in March can quietly disappear from the same question by June with nothing on the site having changed. Google's AI Overviews shift even faster, often within weeks. Staying visible means re-testing the real questions customers ask and adjusting the underlying signals on an ongoing basis, not running one audit and calling it finished. See how AI search work is packaged monthly.
We'll test your business against real customer questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, and show you exactly where you stand today.