GENERATIVE ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (GEO)

AI is changing
HOW people find businesses

Your next customer isn't Googling you.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI
IS where businesses get recommended.
Make sure it is YOU.

Get your Visibility Measurement:

Get your GEO St. Score™ →
Smooth Turtle — Does ChatGPT know your business exists?
SEO vs AEO vs GEO β€” SEO gets you found, AEO gets you answered, GEO gets you recommended by AI

See it for yourself β€” right now

Copy this, paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity, fill in your own business name and city, and hit enter. See what AI actually says about you β€” and who it recommends instead.

I own [Your Business Name], a [type of business] in [City, ST]. 1) What do you know about my business specifically β€” reputation, services, reviews? 2) If someone asked you "who's the best [type of business] near [City, ST]?" β€” would you recommend me? If not, who would you recommend instead, and why?

Take this with you — free

No form, no email, nothing to fill out.

Why Your Business Needs GEO

How to Be Found by AI: Your 2026 Blueprint — the short version · PDF, 3 pages

Half of U.S. consumers now use AI search to guide buying decisions, and a brand’s own website accounts for only 5–10% of what an engine reads when answering a question about it. This covers what actually changed, the four things that decide whether an engine names your business, and a five-minute test you can run tonight.

Download the guide ↓

Or type it in: smoothturtle.com/downloads/why-your-business-needs-geo.pdf

GEO St. Score™ — What Gets Measured

PDF · 1 page

The five weighted pillars behind the score, how the test actually runs — twenty questions across four engines, seventeen unbranded and three branded, in clean sessions with no account history steering the answer — and what comes back in the report.

Download the one-pager ↓

Why now

In every market we've measured, most of the questions customers ask AI have no recommended local business at all β€” the customers get sent to big-box stores, directories, or nobody. That ground is unclaimed, and the first business with the right signals takes it. Open turf won't stay open.

The numbers behind it

58%
of small businesses use generative AI

More than doubled in two years. On pace for roughly three in four by year-end.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Empowering Small Business, Aug 2025. '26 projected.

20%
of organizations have started optimizing for AI answers

Four out of five haven't. Meanwhile 70% expect AI answers to reshape their strategy within three years. The turf is open β€” and it is being claimed right now.

Acquia / Frase AEO research, 2026.

23%
of all digital queries now go to AI assistants

Google still leads at 77% β€” but that number was in the nineties three years ago. Every point it sheds is a customer who never sees a page of ranked links at all. They get one answer, and you are either named in it or you are not.

FirstPageSage, Google vs. ChatGPT Market Share, Q2 2026.

54% → 23%
plan to do GEO vs. actually measure it

Half of teams intend to act. Fewer than a quarter track whether it worked. Intent is not visibility β€” a score is.

Omnibound GEO statistics, May 2026.

Where the questions are going

Share of total digital queries, 2023 – 2026

Google search AI assistants
100%75%50% 25%0% 20232024 20252026 77% 93% 23% 2%

2026 figures are Q2 actuals (FirstPageSage: Google 77.0%, ChatGPT 17.9%, other AI assistants 5.1%). 2023–2025 points are blended from published AI-search share estimates — AI search sat near 5–6% in early 2025 and 12–15% by late 2025. Shares exclude non-search digital query types, so the two series do not sum to 100%.

Get your AI Visibility Measurement:

Get your GEO St. Scoreβ„’ β†’

Get your report

Here's what you'll get.

  • βœ“ A presence audit that goes beyond your website β€” we see what your overall presence looks like, and have AI tools describe what they see.
  • βœ“ 17 questions, built from what your website and presence actually say, run against the major AI engines to see how they respond β€” who gets recommended, who gets mentioned, and who doesn't show up at all. It can vary dramatically from AI engine to engine.
  • βœ“ Real-world fixes, included as part of the report.

You'll also see who your competitors are in that space β€” and why they were recommended over or under you across the different questions.

Here's exactly what's in it β€” scored across five components, 100 points:

Unbranded presence β€” do you come up when someone describes the problem and doesn't know your name?45 pts
Citation share β€” is your site a source the AI engines actually pull from?20 pts
Branded recognition β€” do the engines know you when someone names you?15 pts
Engine coverage β€” how many engines, so one lucky result can't carry the score10 pts
Entity accuracy β€” is what they say about you actually correct?10 pts

Bands: A 85+ · B 70+ · C 55+ · D 35+ · F under 35. The scoring is deterministic β€” the same captures always produce the same score, which is what makes your 90-day retest a comparison instead of an opinion.

The reports we produce

$195GEO St. Score™ Report

The full baseline — twelve sections, your score and band, who owns the answers today, and the fixes ranked by leverage.

$294Report + Evidence together

The most common choice: the diagnosis and the raw proof behind it, in one purchase.

+$99Evidence Add-on

Every question and every engine's answer, verbatim — plus a competitor analysis and the authoritative sources the engines leaned on.

quotedMarket St. Radar™

The standings board for a whole market: who gets recommended, and which questions nobody owns yet.

quotedEntity Probe™

What the engines actually know about a business, and which sources taught them.

quotedCompetitor Reports

Any named competitor run through the same battery, side by side with you.

Example 1 — the GEO St. Score™ report

Here's what the top of the report looks like:

Sample Plumbing Co. Β· fictional example
38.0/100

Band D

Unbranded presenceβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘ 9/45
Citation shareβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘ 4/20
Branded recognitionβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–‘ 13/15
Engine coverageβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘ 5/10
Entity accuracyβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–‘β–‘β–‘ 7/10

Read that pattern: the engines know this business perfectly well when you name it, and almost never bring it up when you don't. That's the most common shape we see β€” retrievable, but not recommended.

And a line from each section of the report itself:

1 · Capture validity

Run ST-4471 · 68 of 68 cells captured · clean room VERIFIED · grounding confirmed on all four engines. Nothing below is an estimate.

3 · What the data says

Branded recognition 87% against unbranded presence 20%. When someone names this business, the engines know it. When they describe the problem instead, it is not in the room.

4 · Engine-by-engine

Perplexity named it on 3 of 17 questions. ChatGPT named it on 0. Same questions, same day — the engines ground on different sources, which is what makes the gap actionable.

5 · Who owns the answers today

Yelp, Angi and Thumbtack take 61% of citations on the unbranded questions. Other operators take 12% — and that is the most beatable tier there is.

6 · Who gets named instead of you

Three competitors appear on questions where this business does not. One of them is named on 11 of the 17.

8 · Where to attack first

“How much does repiping cost in Florida” — absent, and no incumbent owns it either. Absent plus fragmented is the highest-leverage page you can build this month.

9 & 10 · Site changes and real-world authority

The page build order that falls out of section 8, the entity fixes that make you one business instead of three, and the off-site moves — ranked by effort against payoff.

Twelve sections in all. Section 7 is the full verdict matrix — every question against every engine, so any single cell can be audited:

Live AI Test Results

What a customer asks AIResult
Best plumber near me in Tampaβœ— Not mentioned
Emergency water heater repair Tampaβ—Ž Mentioned
How much does repiping cost in Floridaβœ— Not mentioned
Plumber with best reviews South Tampaβœ— Not mβ€”

The rest of this report is where your customers went.

Every question is run blind. We test each one from a fresh AI session with no account history and no personal signals β€” the same way an AI helping a stranger would see you. If you run these questions yourself from your own logged-in AI accounts, you may get noticeably better answers β€” not because that's what's publicly findable, but because that AI may already remember your business from your own past conversations with it. Our report shows what a new customer's AI actually sees.

Want to dig into the data yourself? Add the full text of every query for $99. It comes with two additional analyses: a competitor analysis, and a look at the authoritative sources the AI engines used to answer the questions β€” separate from the analysis that's already part of the GEO St. Scoreβ„’ report itself.

Example 2 β€” what AI expects from your content

The score tells you where you stand. This tells you how to write so an engine will quote you. Every report ships with the writing method behind its fixes β€” the habits that decide whether an AI engine lifts your sentence or skips past it. Here is one of them in full.

Coastal Roofing Co. Β· a different fictional example
Technique 1 β€” Front-load the direct answer

AI engines lift the first sentence as the quotable answer. If sentence one is a hook or a story, the engine quotes something vague β€” or skips the passage entirely.

The question a customer actually asks: β€œDo I need a new roof or just a repair?”

Before β€” Most homeowners in Pinellas County don’t think about their roof until a storm forces the issue.
After β€” You need a full replacement if shingles are curling across more than a third of the roof, or if the decking feels soft underfoot; below that, a repair usually holds. Most homeowners in Pinellas County don’t think about it until a storm forces the issue.

Same content. Same voice. The answer just moved to the front β€” and now it stands on its own when an engine lifts it out of context.

Technique 2 β€” Make every answer self-contained

An engine will pull one paragraph out of context, and the reader may never see the question it answered. So an answer cannot lean on β€œthis,” β€œit,” or β€œthat number” without restating what they refer to.

Before β€” It’s what happens when the underlayment gives out before the shingles do.
After β€” Premature underlayment failure is what happens when the waterproof layer beneath your shingles brβ€”

There are several more β€” and your report names the ones your pages are missing.

Get your GEO St. Scoreβ„’ β†’

This is NOT SEO.

SEO gets you ranked on a results page and hopes a customer clicks. GEO makes YOUR BUSINESS the AI's answer. When someone asks an AI assistant "who should resurface my pool?" or "best cabinet company near me," the AI doesn't show ten blue links β€” it names two or three businesses. Being one of them is a different game with different rules, and almost nobody in your market is playing it yet.

Your Google profile and search presence still matter β€” they're one piece of what we measure. We measure what search consultants never look at:

  • βœ“ Can AI read your business at all?
  • βœ“ Do your services exist as answers to the questions customers actually ask?
  • βœ“ Can the sources AI trusts vouch for you?
  • βœ“ Is it improving month over month β€” provably?

Provably β€” how a claim holds up. Provability β€” the quality of having proof. We build both into every report.

Every piece is doable. Every piece is measurable.

The GEO St. Scoreβ„’ (pronounced "Geo Street Score")

A 100-point benchmark of how ready your business is to be found, cited, and recommended by AI — built from live testing, not guesswork.

Every question is run blind. Each one is put to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity from a fresh session with no account history and no personal signals — the same way an AI helping a stranger would see you. A failed clean room voids the run.

Scoring is deterministic: the same captures always produce the same score. That is what turns your 90-day retest into a comparison instead of an opinion.

The sample scorecard, a line from each section of the report, and the live test results are in Get your report above.

Our 5-Step GEO St. Process

  1. 1 · Domain & intake β€” we define your market, your named services and your service area, then read what your site and public presence actually say about you. Everything downstream is built from what is really there, not from a template.
  2. 2 · Question battery β€” we build the questions a real customer asks, phrased the way they would actually ask them. Unbranded questions carry the most weight, because those are the ones asked by people who do not know your name yet.
  3. 3 · Blind capture β€” every question goes live to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity from a fresh session with no account history, and the answers are recorded word for word. A failed clean room voids the run rather than shipping a soft number.
  4. 4 · Human review & scoring β€” a person checks what the engines actually said before anything is scored. Then the five components are scored out of 100, deterministically. Anything still awaiting review is held out and disclosed, never quietly scored zero.
  5. 5 · Report & re-measurement β€” the twelve-section report: your score and band, who owns the answers today, who gets named instead of you, and the fixes ranked by leverage. Then a retest on the same battery, so progress is measured rather than promised.

How the questions are developed, tested and weighted is our trade secret β€” that is what makes the score mean something.

What we can do for you

GEO St. Scoreβ„’ Report

Your complete baseline: where AI recommends you, where it skips you, what's broken, and the evidence behind every finding β€” with your business highlighted in the actual AI answers.

Market St. Radarβ„’

The standings board for your whole market: which businesses AI recommends on the questions your customers ask, and the questions nobody owns yet β€” first mover keeps that ground.

Entity Probeβ„’

What does AI actually know about your business β€” and from which sources? If AI has you wrong, every recommendation starts from that mistake. A measurement no one else offers.

Competitor Reports

Any named competitor, run through the same engine, side by side with you. Know their strengths before you spend against them.

Implementation

We don't just diagnose β€” we fix: the structured code AI reads, the answer pages customers need, the directory presence AI trusts. We can build and host your site too β€” we cannot guarantee what we cannot touch.

GEO St. Trackerβ„’

Monthly re-measurement, hosting, and maintenance. Every month, a new scorecard. Every change, provable. "You were absent on this question in July; you're recommended in September."