Here is a question worth sitting with for a moment: when someone in your suburb needs a plumber at 10pm, or a mechanic on a Saturday, or a cafe for a work lunch - where do they search?
A year ago, the answer was Google. Today, a growing number of them open ChatGPT, ask Perplexity - or they do search Google, but get an AI Overview at the top of the page that answers their question before they ever scroll down to the blue links.
According to Roy Morgan research from March 2026, 13.6 million Australians - 58% of people aged 14 and over - now use AI tools in any given four-week period. ChatGPT alone has 10.5 million Australian users. And the age bracket driving this is not teenagers: 72-74% of Australians aged 25 to 49 are using AI tools regularly. That is precisely the demographic that books tradies, chooses mechanics, and picks a restaurant for Friday night.
This is not a trend to watch. It is already happening, and most small businesses have done nothing about it.
What GEO Is (and How It Differs From SEO)
SEO - search engine optimisation - is what most people think of when they think about being found online. The goal is to rank in Google’s blue links so people click through to your website.
GEO - Generative Engine Optimisation - is about getting your business named or recommended inside an AI-generated answer. The difference matters because when someone asks ChatGPT “who’s a good electrician in Ipswich?”, there is no list of ten blue links to choose from. There are one or two names, given with confidence. If your business is not one of them, the conversation moves on without you.
The underlying mechanics are also different:
- SEO rewards keyword density and backlinks. GEO rewards structured, extractable information and clear entity signals - meaning the AI can actually understand who you are and what you do.
- SEO measures rankings and clicks. GEO measures how often your business gets cited or named in AI responses.
- SEO content can be narrative and thorough. GEO content needs to put the answer first. Research shows that 55% of AI Overview citations come from the first 30% of page content. Bury your service description in paragraph six and AI ignores it.
GEO does not replace SEO. But it is an additional layer that most Australian businesses have not started thinking about yet, which means there is a genuine first-mover advantage available right now.
Why Local Service Businesses Have the Most at Stake
If you run an eCommerce store and someone asks AI for a product recommendation, you are competing with national and international sellers across multiple platforms. The stakes are real, but they are spread wide.
If you are a tradie, a mechanic, a physio, or a cafe owner, the AI search result for your local area is winner-take-most. Someone asking “best plumber near Chermside” is going to get one or two names. There is no page two.
Only 1.2% of business locations currently get recommended by ChatGPT for local queries. That is a brutal number, but it cuts both ways - it means almost no one in your area has figured this out yet, and getting into that 1.2% is achievable with the right groundwork.
The conversion case for getting there is strong. Traffic referred from ChatGPT converts at 7.1% - almost identical to paid search, and far above typical organic traffic. These are high-intent people who have already asked a specific question and been given a specific recommendation. They are not browsing. They are ready to call.
What AI Actually Uses to Decide Who to Recommend
AI tools are not pulling recommendations out of thin air. They are synthesising signals from your Google Business Profile, third-party directories, your website content, and your reviews. Here is what the research shows matters most:
Reviews - and your responses to them. Businesses recommended by ChatGPT average 4.3 stars. More importantly, businesses with a review response rate below 5% are effectively invisible to AI recommendation engines. Responding to every review - positive and negative - is not just good practice. It is now a ranking signal.
Google Business Profile completeness. Google Gemini pulls directly from Google Maps data, and its local recommendation accuracy is nearly 10x higher than ChatGPT’s as a result. The gap comes entirely from businesses with incomplete profiles. Your name, address, phone, hours, service list, and photos all need to be accurate and complete.
Content recency. Content updated within the last 30 days receives 3.2x more citations than older material. A website that has not been touched in two years is effectively invisible to AI systems that weight freshness heavily.
Structured data on your website. Pages with FAQ schema markup are 3.2x more likely to appear in Google AI Overviews. LocalBusiness schema - your name, address, phone, service area, and opening hours marked up in JSON-LD format - helps AI systems understand exactly who you are and where you operate.
Consistent NAP across every listing. NAP stands for name, address, phone. If your business is listed as “Smith Plumbing” on your website, “Smith’s Plumbing” on Yellow Pages, and “Smith Plumbing Services” on HiPages, AI entity resolution breaks down. It cannot confidently identify you as a single business. Exact consistency across every directory listing matters.
Five Things to Do This Week
You do not need to overhaul your entire digital presence to start improving your AI visibility. These five actions, done properly, will move the needle more than anything else.
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Audit your Google Business Profile. Log in and fill every field: services, products, business description, hours (including holidays), and at least 10 recent photos of your actual work. This is the highest-leverage action available.
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Check your review count and star average. If you are below 4.3 stars or have fewer than 20 reviews, make getting more reviews your immediate priority. Send a text message to every recent customer with your Google review link - SMS follow-ups convert at the highest rate.
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Respond to every review you have not yet replied to. A response rate above 50% is meaningfully better than under 5%. Set aside 15 minutes this week and work through your backlog.
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Check NAP consistency across your listings. Search your business name and suburb, then click through Yellow Pages, True Local, Hotfrog, HiPages, and any industry-specific directories you are listed in. Fix any inconsistencies - “Street” vs “St”, old phone numbers, old addresses.
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Add a FAQ page to your website. Write out the ten questions your customers actually ask before they call you. Format each one as a direct question heading with a direct answer as the first sentence. This is the single most effective piece of content you can add for AI Overview visibility.
Schema markup and structured data are the next layer beyond these five - if you want help implementing that on your website, it is something we handle as part of our standard website and SEO work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I track my rankings inside AI answers the same way I track Google rankings?
Not in the traditional sense - there’s no equivalent of a rank-tracking tool showing you position 1 through 10 inside ChatGPT. What you can track is whether your business gets named at all for queries relevant to you, by regularly asking the AI tools yourself the questions a customer would, and by monitoring referral traffic in your analytics from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar sources.
Do I need to change my website content specifically for AI search?
Not a complete rewrite - but the structure matters more than it used to. Put the direct answer to a likely question in the first few sentences of a page rather than building up to it, since AI systems weight early content far more heavily. The same content written to satisfy a human reading top to bottom often needs its key point moved higher up to work for GEO.
Does GEO cost extra on top of SEO?
Not as a separate service in most cases - the signals that help GEO (a complete Google Business Profile, consistent NAP, structured data, fresh content, review responses) are largely the same fundamentals that support good SEO. It’s less a separate budget line and more a shift in what “doing SEO properly” now includes.
How long does it take to see results in AI answers?
Faster than traditional SEO in some respects, because AI systems weight content recency heavily - content updated in the last 30 days receives 3.2x more citations than older material. That doesn’t mean instant results, but the feedback loop between making a change and it potentially influencing an AI answer is generally shorter than waiting for a Google ranking to move.
If you want help getting your business appearing in AI search results, get in touch - we can audit your current visibility and put a plan together.
Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash
