AI Search & GEO

Search is splitting in two. Alongside the classic blue links and the local pack, a new discovery layer has formed: AI assistants and answer engines — ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot — that don't return ten options, they return a recommendation. For home-service businesses this is a quieter but faster-moving shift than the mobile or local-pack transitions were, because these systems are radically more selective: where the local pack shows three results, an AI assistant often names one. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the discipline of being the business it names.

This category covers how to earn that visibility in practice: structuring your site and Google Business Profile so AI systems can parse and trust your service, location, and proof; mining the conversational, recommendation-style queries homeowners actually type into an assistant ("who's the best emergency plumber near me that's open now?"); using review content and FAQs to feed the language these models match against; and building the entity and citation consistency that makes an AI confident enough to recommend you. We also cover measurement — how to tell whether AI search is sending you anything — and the honest limits of a channel that's still forming.

Think of this as the optimization layer that sits upstream of everything else: by the time a homeowner reaches your website, an AI may have already decided whether you were worth mentioning. The posts here are about being on the short list.