Frequently Asked Questions

Smooth Turtle LLC is an AI consulting firm for small businesses in Tampa Bay, founded by Timothy C. Hays, PhD. We build websites, bots, and AI agents, run AI strategy engagements, and help businesses get found and recommended by AI search tools (that last one is called GEO — more below).

Tim has 30+ years of AI and data science experience, including federal leadership at NIH, and now applies that same systems-thinking to small businesses that don't have an in-house technical team.

We're based in Tampa, FL, and work with small businesses across the Tampa Bay area and beyond — the tools and methods aren't location-locked.

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization — making sure AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity actually know your business exists, understand what you do, and recommend you when someone asks. See our GEO page for the full picture.

SEO gets you ranked on a results page and hopes a customer clicks. GEO makes your business the AI's answer when someone asks who to hire. Your SEO and Google Business presence still matter — they're one input GEO measures — but GEO also looks at things SEO never touches, like whether AI can actually read and trust your business information.

It's a 100-point benchmark of how ready your business is to be found, cited, and recommended by AI, built from live testing rather than guesswork. It covers Foundation, Presence, Content, and Visibility.

GEO is a monthly-tracked process, not a one-time fix — we baseline where you stand today, make specific changes, and re-measure so progress is provable, not promised.

A bot answers questions and captures leads on your website 24/7 — it talks, but it doesn't take action on its own. An agent connects to your real systems (email, calendar, spreadsheets) and completes multi-step tasks without you — it logs data, drafts emails, and reports back.

Our standard turnaround for a mobile-ready site with a bot built in is 72 hours. Every build includes search-ready structure standard — meta titles, descriptions, schema markup, and clean markup Google can read.

No — every bot and agent is configured with a system prompt that restricts it to your business. It will redirect off-topic questions rather than improvise, which is both a better user experience and a liability safeguard.

It depends on what you need — see the full pricing page for current numbers on sites, bots, agents, GEO packages, and AI strategy engagements. Every project is quoted in writing before we start.

Yes — hosting can be cancelled anytime with 30 days' notice.

Combining multiple services (a site plus a bot, for example) reduces your total cost. Ask about bundle pricing when you book your free call.

Yes — community AI education talks and scheduled group presentations (at your existing meeting) are always free. Private workshops and one-on-one coaching are paid. See the Presentations section on the homepage for details.

On the What's New page — upcoming talks are listed there, and the recording and transcript get added once each one happens.

Email ai@smoothturtle.com, or use the contact page to book a free 45-minute discovery call.