What is AI search optimization (GEO)?

A growing share of your customers no longer starts at a search results page. They ask ChatGPT "who is the best roofer near me" or see Google answer the question directly at the top of the page in an AI Overview. In both cases, a system reads a handful of sources and names specific businesses. Either your business is in that answer or your competitor is.

AI referral traffic is still a small slice of overall web traffic, but it converts at roughly 4 to 5 times the rate of ordinary search visitors, because the recommendation has already been made before the click. Being the business an AI names works less like a search ranking and more like a referral.

This is not magic and it is not random. Each system retrieves from real, inspectable sources.

• ChatGPT search retrieves through Bing. If your site is barely indexed in Bing (most local sites are), ChatGPT effectively cannot see you, regardless of how you rank on Google.
• Google AI Overviews overwhelmingly cite pages that already rank on page one of ordinary Google results. Good SEO remains the entry ticket.
• Local recommendations triangulate your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Bing Places, and review text. Inconsistent data across those sources reads as low confidence.
• All systems favor pages with structured data (schema markup) and content formatted as direct answers: a question, a clear answer, real numbers, quotable sentences.

A real GEO engagement is plumbing plus content plus measurement. The plumbing: Bing indexing (Webmaster Tools and IndexNow), schema markup for your organization, services, and FAQs, AI crawler access in robots.txt, and consistent name, address, and category data everywhere AI systems look. The content: pages that answer the literal questions customers ask, answer-first, with numbers worth quoting. The measurement: asking the assistants your customers’ questions every month, logged with dates, so you can see yourself appear.

We ran this exact playbook on Dekree, a municipal software product we built and market ourselves. Search impressions grew more than 30x in the first two weeks, its comparison pages reached page one of Google within days, and ChatGPT and Gemini were both citing it within a month. That is the receipt we show prospects, with dates.

The industry around AI search is young and full of snake oil, so here is our honest scorecard.

• Real: Bing indexing for ChatGPT visibility, schema markup, FAQ content, review text quality, and consistency across GBP, Yelp, and Bing Places.
• Real: early-mover advantage. Local AI answers are still volatile, which means they can still be won cheaply.
• Mostly hype: llms.txt as a ranking lever. It costs nothing to have (we have one) but almost no AI crawler reads it today, so treat it as a checkbox, not a strategy.
• Pure snake oil: any vendor promising "guaranteed placement in ChatGPT" or selling a proprietary "AI visibility score" they cannot explain. Nobody controls these systems. The honest version is logged, dated visibility checks.