AI Search Engine Optimisation (AI SEO / GEO)

Q: Can you guarantee my business will be recommended by ChatGPT?

No — anyone who guarantees a specific outcome from a system they don't control isn't being straight with you. What we can do is structure your online presence properly so you're genuinely in the running to be found and cited.

A growing number of your customers are no longer typing a search into Google first. They’re asking ChatGPT “who’s a good local SEO company near Derby,” or asking Gemini to recommend a plumber, or asking Perplexity to compare a few options and just tell them who to call. If your business isn’t structured to be found, trusted, and cited by those tools, you’re invisible to a customer who has, in effect, already decided to buy — they’re just asking an AI to pick who from.

This is what’s known as AI SEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO): the practice of structuring your online presence so AI platforms can find, understand, trust, and recommend your business. It’s related to traditional SEO but not the same thing — the signals AI models weigh up are different from the ones that drive a classic Google ranking, and most businesses (and most agencies) haven’t caught up yet.

How AI platforms actually decide who to recommend

AI search tools pull from a mix of sources: your website content, your Google Business Profile, third-party review platforms, local citations, and increasingly, structured data (schema markup) that explicitly tells a machine what your business does, where it operates, and what it’s rated. A vague “About Us” page and an unclaimed listing give an AI model nothing solid to cite. A clearly structured, consistently repeated set of facts about your business — the same name, address, services, and reputation, everywhere — gives it plenty.

What we actually do for AI SEO

Structured data and schema markup — LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage and Review schema added properly across your site, giving AI platforms and search engines machine-readable facts rather than making them guess from prose.
Content built to be citable — clear, direct answers to the specific questions your customers actually ask, structured so an AI model can lift a genuinely useful, accurate answer straight from your page.
Consistent NAP and citation building — the same core facts about your business repeated accurately everywhere, which is exactly the kind of consistency AI models use as a trust signal.
Genuine review management — AI tools weigh real, recent reviews heavily when deciding who to recommend, which is another reason properly managing your Google Business Profile reviews matters more than ever.

AI SEO doesn’t replace traditional SEO — it sits alongside it

We’re not suggesting you abandon Google rankings for AI platforms — the two work together, and most of the technical and local SEO foundations covered on our main SEO services page directly support AI visibility too. What’s changed is that “get found on Google” is no longer the whole picture. A serious growth strategy today covers both.

Geoff, our founder, sums up why this matters: “Our customers tell us Semlocal is the best local SEO company they’ve ever spoken to, and when they’ve compared us against a couple of other agencies, we’re often both the cheapest and the best value. The businesses who come to us for AI SEO specifically are usually the ones who’ve just realised how much revenue they were quietly losing by only being visible on Google and nowhere else.”

Multi-location businesses and AI search

For businesses with several sites, AI SEO has an added wrinkle: AI models need to correctly distinguish between your locations, not blend them into one vague answer or, worse, recommend the wrong branch to a customer. That means genuinely distinct, accurate, per-location content and schema — not templated pages with the town name swapped out, which both traditional and AI search increasingly recognise and discount.

If you’re not sure whether your business is even visible to AI search tools right now, our marketing consulting service includes an honest AI visibility check as standard — no sales pitch, just a clear picture of where you stand.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between AI SEO, GEO and traditional SEO?

Traditional SEO targets Google’s ranking algorithm. AI SEO, also called Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), targets how AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity select and cite businesses when answering a question directly. They overlap significantly — good technical and local SEO foundations help both — but AI SEO puts extra weight on structured data, consistency, and content written to directly answer specific questions.

Can you guarantee my business will be recommended by ChatGPT?

No — and anyone who guarantees a specific outcome from a system they don’t control isn’t being straight with you. What we can do is structure your online presence properly so you’re genuinely in the running to be found and cited, rather than invisible by default.

Is AI SEO worth it for a small local business?

Increasingly, yes. AI search usage is growing fastest precisely among the kind of quick, local, “who should I call” questions small businesses depend on. The businesses ignoring this now are the ones who’ll be playing catch-up in a year or two.