GEO for Small Business: Read This Before You Sign an AI Visibility Retainer

Somebody has offered to get your business into ChatGPT. Maybe it came as a cold email with a screenshot of an AI answer naming three of your competitors and not you. It might have been a LinkedIn message, or a call from the agency that sold you SEO a few years back and now sells something called GEO. Either way, there is usually a monthly retainer attached, and a quiet suggestion that if you do not sign, you will be left behind.

I get asked about these offers most weeks now, so let me give you the answer I give on the phone. Hold off. AI search is not a fad, and I am not about to tell you it is. The reason to wait is that three studies that did the rounds in October, along with Google's own documentation, point the same way. For a business like yours, that money almost certainly works harder somewhere else.

What you are actually being offered

GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. You will also see AEO, answer engine optimisation. Google's guide to optimising for its AI features defines both terms, then says something the people selling them rarely quote: "optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO" ^[4].

The packages vary, but the ingredients repeat. An "AI visibility audit". A monthly dashboard tracking how often your business gets named across a list of prompts somebody typed into ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Rewriting your pages into short "chunks" that AI supposedly prefers. An llms.txt file. And sometimes, paid "mentions" planted on other websites so the assistants pick up your name.

Parts of that are harmless. Others are money for nothing, and a couple of items are things Google specifically tells you to skip. If you are still finding your bearings with AI and websites generally, our overview of what AI-powered WordPress means for business owners covers the ground underneath all of this.

What the October numbers say

The first study came from Marie Haynes, a search consultant, who pulled 12 months of Google Analytics data from 100 websites covering more than 145 million visits ^[1]. Sessions from ChatGPT amounted to a little over half of one percent of the visits Google's ordinary results sent. Add every other AI assistant and it barely moved, to roughly three quarters of a percent. Google still drove somewhere around 96 to 97 percent of all the conversions she could measure. Her headline was blunt: GEO is a distraction.

The SEO Works, a UK agency, tracked 95 websites from September 2025 to August 2026 ^[2]. Organic search sent roughly 39 times more traffic than AI assistants. Put that in business terms. For every 100 enquiries or sales that came through Google's normal results, AI assistants produced about three. The gap did narrow over the year, from the mid-40s to the low-30s, though the authors call that trend provisional.

Kevin Indig then went looking for the "hidden" AI traffic that GEO sellers often claim is buried in your direct visits ^[3]. Across 12 sites, he could not find it. Much of the growth in direct traffic turned out to be bots, and visits carrying any identifiable AI trace were a vanishingly small share. He also found no reliable link between how often a brand appeared in AI answers and how many people went on to search for it by name.

Read the small print too

None of these studies is perfect, and I would not want you treating them as gospel any more than you should treat a sales deck that way. Indig's sample is 12 sites, mostly American and mostly B2B. Haynes and The SEO Works both sell search services, so they have their own angle. None of the samples is Irish.

They also found something the GEO crowd will point to, and fairly. Visitors from AI assistants often convert well. In the Haynes data, ChatGPT visitors converted at several times the rate of Google visitors. In the SEO Works data the edge was slimmer, and on roughly a third of the sites AI visitors converted worse than organic ones. A better rate on a tiny number is still a tiny number. Will a handful of extra enquiries a year, however keen, cover a year-long retainer? For most local firms, no.

The bit the pitch leaves out

Look at what the SEO Works study had to exclude. Clicks from Google's own AI Overviews land in your analytics as ordinary Google search visits, so they were counted as organic rather than AI ^[2]. That matters. For most local businesses, the AI answer customers actually see is Google's, sitting at the top of a normal results page.

Google is direct about what it takes to appear there. Its documentation says "there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary" ^[5]. The newer optimisation guide goes further ^[4]. You do not need new machine-readable or AI text files. There is no requirement to break content into tiny pieces, and no special writing style for AI. Chasing inauthentic mentions across the web "isn't as helpful as it might seem". And the line I would print out and stick beside the phone: "No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems."

So when someone shows you a dashboard measuring your "AI share of voice", think about what it measures. A sample of prompts the vendor chose, run through assistants whose answers shift from one day to the next. Are those the questions your customers really type? Nobody can tell you that, including the person selling the dashboard.

A composite case worth sitting with

Consider an upholsterer in Kildare. A composite, not a real customer. Good trade, steady work from word of mouth and a few interior designers, a website put together years ago. A cold email arrives with a screenshot: ask a chatbot for the best upholsterer nearby and two rivals come up. The offer is a monthly AI visibility package with a year-long minimum term.

Now imagine the year that follows a signature. A monthly PDF tracks a few dozen prompts, and the share-of-voice line wobbles up and down. Meanwhile the website still has one Services page listing "reupholstery, foam, fabrics" in a single line. Nothing on antique chairs, nothing on caravan cushions, no turnaround times, no sense of which towns are covered. The questions customers ring with every week are answered nowhere on the site. When the renewal email lands, there is a stack of reports and not one job anybody can trace back to them.

That is the real cost. Not the fee by itself, but a year spent paying someone to measure the problem instead of fixing it.

Where your money goes further

The things that help you appear in AI answers are very nearly the things that help you in Google, full stop. Most of them cost an afternoon rather than a retainer.

1. Answer the questions you hear on the phone. One page per main job, with the direct answer in its opening paragraph: what you do, where you go, how long it takes, and what you do not do.
2. Make your Business Profile agree with your website. Same hours, same services, same number. A contradiction gives any AI a reason to pick somebody else.
3. Keep the site fast and easy to crawl. If Google cannot fetch a page quickly and read the text on it, no GEO package will get it cited.
4. Look at the free data first. Search Console now has a generative AI performance report showing how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Google says it reached all websites worldwide by 31 August 2026 ^[6]. Our guide to tracking AI referral traffic explains what that report can and cannot tell you.
5. Ask new customers how they found you. Indig's own recommendation is to combine where you appear in AI answers with what customers tell you directly ^[3]. One optional line on your contact form costs nothing.

What the free route cannot do

An honest limitation, though. That Search Console report covers Google only. It shows impressions, not clicks, and tells you nothing about ChatGPT, Gemini or anyone else. If someone asks a chatbot about you, you will mostly never know unless they mention it. That blind spot is real, and it is exactly the space GEO sellers fill with dashboards. My point is only that a dashboard built on a guess is still a guess.

When paying for help does make sense

To be fair to the agencies, for some businesses this is worth real money. If you sell software or professional services to other businesses nationally, and AI referrals already show up in your analytics at meaningful volume, keeping an eye on what the assistants say about you is sensible. The same goes for an established online brand with a marketing team and a budget for testing. The SEO Works found AI traffic tended to grow where organic traffic grew ^[2], so firms already strong in search stand to gain the most from tracking it.

That is not the café, the physio or the upholsterer, though. For a local firm, a GEO retainer usually means paying for a monthly report about a channel that sends a handful of visits a year.

The setup that makes the basics easy

If the advice is to do the fundamentals yourself, your platform has to let you. Four things matter. You should be able to add or edit a page yourself the same day a new customer question comes in, with no change request and no hourly bill. Pages should load quickly on a phone and be simple for Google to fetch. You should be able to see which pages people actually land on without a cookie banner getting in the way. And the price should not climb every time you add content.

Web60 was built to meet that standard. You describe your business and an AI builder drafts a full WordPress site from your own words in under a minute, and from day one you own and edit every page. Underneath sits Nginx with Redis object caching and FastCGI page caching, which in practice means pages arrive quickly for customers on mobile data and for Google's crawler alike. Privacy-first analytics come built in with no cookie consent needed for them, support comes from a real Irish team, and the whole thing costs €60 a year, all-inclusive.

Before you reply to that email

AI search is real, and it will keep growing. Nobody sensible is telling you to ignore it. What this autumn's data says is that, for now, Google still sends small businesses the overwhelming majority of their customers, and Google says its AI answers reward the same things its ordinary results always have.

So write down the answers your customers need, keep your profile straight, check the free reports and ask people how they found you. If AI assistants start sending you enough enquiries to notice, you will see it in your own numbers first, and whether a specialist is worth paying becomes a decision you can make with real evidence in front of you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is GEO in SEO?

GEO stands for generative engine optimisation: trying to get a business named or cited in answers from AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. You will also see it called AEO, answer engine optimisation. Google's own guide to generative AI search defines both terms and says that optimising for generative AI search is still SEO, so the fundamentals that help you in ordinary Google results are the same ones that help you appear in its AI answers.

Does my small business need GEO?

For most local businesses, not as a separate paid service. Studies published in October 2026, each covering up to roughly 100 websites, found that AI assistants sent a small fraction of the traffic and conversions that Google search did. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Clear service pages, an accurate Business Profile and a fast, crawlable website do most of the work. A business that already sees meaningful AI referrals in its own analytics may benefit from monitoring them.

Can anyone guarantee my business will appear in ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews?

No. AI answers change from one query to the next, and Google states that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems. It also tells site owners to be wary of tools that promise ranking success. A good agency can improve your odds by improving your website, but anyone promising a guaranteed placement is selling a guess.

How can I see if my website appears in Google AI Overviews?

Search Console has a generative AI performance report showing impressions for your pages in AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by page, country, device and date. Google says it had reached all websites worldwide by 31 August 2026. It is free, but it covers only Google, shows impressions rather than clicks, and tells you nothing about ChatGPT or other assistants.

How do I know if customers found my business through ChatGPT?

Analytics can show some of it, because visits from chatgpt.com and similar sites often appear as referrals, but some arrive with no label at all. The most reliable method is to ask. Add an optional "How did you hear about us?" field to your contact form and ask new callers the same question. Over a few months, that tells you more about AI as a source of customers than any third-party dashboard.

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