How GEO relates to SEO
The inputs overlap almost entirely. A page an engine cannot crawl or index loses in both, and Google says a page needs to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, with no additional technical requirements. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude run their own search crawlers, but none of them can recommend what it cannot fetch or reconcile.
What differs is the finish. A search result is a ranked link; an answer is a sentence that names a business. So the facts about you have to be specific, consistent and corroborated enough to repeat, and the content has to say things a competitor could not. The complete GEO guide covers the difference in depth.
What the work covers, in order
Each step depends on the one before it. Nothing later rescues a failure earlier.
Nothing blocking the engines
robots.txt, CDN bot rules and noindex or nosnippet tags checked against the crawlers behind each answer: Googlebot for Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. And the Search Console setting for Google's generative AI features left on its default, which includes your site. These failures are cheap to check and absolute when they happen.
Facts that agree everywhere
Name, address, phone, hours, categories and services reading the same on your site, your Google Business Profile and every listing that describes you. For a business that competes in a place, this is the local AI search work, and it usually comes first.
Corroboration where the engines look
Reviews earned within each platform's rules, on the platforms your customers read. Mentions from sources with no reason to flatter you: local press, professional associations, chambers, curated local lists. Never bought, because a bought mention is a liability the day it is noticed.
Core pages that state what a recommendation needs
One page per core service, in the words customers use: where you work, who it is for, how pricing works, and the questions customers ask as headings. Structured data that mirrors the visible facts, using the most specific business type and linking your real profiles.
Content only you can publish
This is where content marketing lives now: fewer pieces, each built on first-hand facts — real price ranges, what a first appointment involves, what you know about your area that nobody has written down. Not a page for every phrasing of a question, which Google treats as scaled content abuse when it is done mainly to manipulate rankings or AI answers.
Measured every month
The free scan before and after, and a dated log of the questions your customers ask — run in fresh sessions across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and repeated monthly. Answers vary between people and between days, so we report a repeated sample: whether you were named, how you were described, and who was named instead.
What we skip, and why
| Tactic | What the evidence says |
|---|---|
| An llms.txt file as a visibility lever | Google says its Search ignores the file. Keeping one does no harm there |
| FAQ markup for rich results | Google stopped showing FAQ rich results for all sites on May 7, 2026 |
| Special “AI schema” | Google says no special schema.org markup is needed for its AI features |
| Chunking or rewriting pages for AI | Google says neither is required |
| Buying or seeding mentions | Google says inauthentic mentions are not as helpful as they might seem |
| Tools that promise AI rankings | Google says no third-party tool has access to its ranking or AI systems |
Those are Google's statements about Google. Other engines publish less, so we treat them as the best public evidence rather than universal law.
The evidence we work from
The Front Range AI Visibility Index
70 owner-led businesses, seven batches, five verticals, with the prompts, the tiers and the limits published. 33 of the 66 we could sell to graded weak. Its biggest limit is stated on the page: the scans recorded which businesses were named, not which sources the engines cited. Read the Index.
One engagement shown in full
Wild Sky Paragliding is run by our own founder, so it is not an independent reference and we say so first. What it allows is detail: what was broken, what changed, what is verifiable on the live site, and what we have not measured. Read the case study.
A published rubric
The free scan's 26 scored checks, their weights, and what the scan cannot see — including that it queries no answer engine. How the scan scores a site.
Where we work
In person across Boulder County and Broomfield. Denver north and northwest, Longmont, Fort Collins and Golden are regular drives, and each city page says what our research did and did not cover there: Boulder, Denver, Longmont, Fort Collins, Golden. For law firms, see AI search for Colorado law firms.
How it starts
A free scan and a conversation. The scan reads your site the way an answer engine's crawler does and shows what it could not find or verify; it does not query ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google. Then we sit down with you, in person where we can, and say which gaps are worth fixing and what that would cost — or that they are not.
