Search is no longer ten blue links. It is a map with three businesses on it, a summary written by a machine, and a growing number of people who ask their phone out loud and never open a search engine at all.
Most of what is sold as GEO is SEO. Google has said so itself, in writing:
“From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”
The same guidance confirms there is no special schema that unlocks AI placement, that structured data is not required for AI features at all, and it explicitly tells site owners to ignore llms.txt files, content chunking and rewriting your pages for machines. AI features run on the same core ranking and anti-spam systems as everything else — which also means manufactured brand mentions are treated as spam, not as strategy.
Taken as a whole, the research puts GEO at roughly 60 to 80% ordinary SEO done properly. Any agency quoting you for a separate GEO product is largely quoting you for SEO with a markup on top.
Every figure behind this, with the study it came from, is set out in full in our search guide.
Put the mechanism together and it is quite simple.
Your Google Business Profile can carry you in the map pack. It can get you recommended by Gemini and read out by Siri, if you have claimed the free Apple listing Siri reads. What it cannot do is get you named by ChatGPT or Perplexity, because those tools cannot see into Google’s walled garden. They read websites. If you have not got one, there is nothing for them to read, and a fast-growing way people are finding local trades goes to whoever does.
If you have been told AI is about to wipe out your search traffic, that is being oversold.
AI Overviews appear on 7.9% of searches classified as local, against 20.5% across all searches. The reason is simple: finding a roofer ends with a phone call and a van turning up, and no chatbot can do that part for you.
The searches that actually bring you work are among the least disrupted on the internet. Blogs and news sites are having a much worse time of it than you are. What has changed for you is not that you are about to disappear — it is that a new place to be found has opened up, and most of your competitors are not in it yet.
None of the above is a separate product we sell you. It is how we build.
Search is not a thing you finish. These are the parts that need to keep going, and they are covered by the monthly management option:
The full list, and what the monthly option covers, is on what’s included in every build. Every build is quoted on what it needs, so ask and you’ll have a figure back within 24 hours.
Possibly not, today. A business with a strong Google listing, steady reviews and a full diary can rank in the map pack without a website at all. What you give up is everything beyond it: the AI answers, a place to prove you are worth the money, and any control if Google changes its rules.
We would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. Anyone telling a fully-booked rural sole trader they are invisible without a website is not telling the truth — the map pack is driven overwhelmingly by your profile, your proximity and your reviews, and a website is only a modest part of it.
The honest case is not that you are invisible. It is that you are capping your ceiling. You cannot be named by ChatGPT or Perplexity, you have nowhere to send a customer who wants convincing before they ring, and you are exposed if Google tightens its listing rules. In a quiet rural patch that may cost you nothing this year. In a competitive town, or when you want to grow, it is the difference.
No, and you should walk away from anyone who does. Nobody outside Google controls the results, and the rules change several times a year. What we can do is build the things that are known to matter, keep them maintained, and show you what is actually happening month to month.
That also goes for anyone promising you AI visibility on a timetable. There is no established way to buy your way into an AI answer, and no credible basis for putting a date on it.