Picture a plumber in Scarborough. Call him Dave. Dave's been running his business for twelve years, he knows every Victorian terrace on the east side, and he can tell you which houses still have lead pipes before he even opens the van. For the last decade, Dave's livelihood has lived or died on one phrase: emergency plumber Scarborough. Rank for that on Google, phone rings. Drop to page two, phone goes quiet.
In 2019, we got Dave to position three. By 2022, position one. His SEO was textbook — clean title tags, a few local citations, a Google Business Profile stuffed with 5-star reviews, and a handful of backlinks from the Scarborough Chamber of Commerce and a couple of local news mentions. That machine still works. It's still producing calls today.
But something started happening in late 2024. Dave's calls from Google stayed flat, then dipped about 11 percent. Meanwhile, a new kind of customer started showing up — people saying things like "ChatGPT said you're the one who does old houses." That sentence is the entire reason RankingLocal exists, and it's the cleanest example I have of why SEO and GEO are now two separate jobs.
What classic SEO did for Dave
SEO, as most tradespeople know it, is a keyword game. Someone types emergency plumber Scarborough into Google, and a list of blue links comes back. The job of SEO is to get you onto that list, preferably in the top three, and ideally inside the local 3-pack at the top of the map.
The tools are well-worn. You optimize page titles. You write a service-area page for each town. You collect backlinks, because Google still treats links like votes. You beg for reviews. You make the site fast and mobile-friendly because Google's crawler checks that now. You add schema markup so Google understands you're a LocalBusiness with hours, a service area, and a phone number.
Dave's SEO numbers looked great. Position 1 for the main phrase. 4.8 stars across 187 Google reviews. 62 percent of his site traffic came from organic Google. Classic stuff.
The whole model assumes someone will click. That's the payoff. Rank, click, call.
What GEO does differently
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is what happens when the customer doesn't click. They open ChatGPT or Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews and ask a messier question: "who's a good plumber in Scarborough who handles old homes with cast iron pipes?"
The AI doesn't return ten blue links. It returns an answer. A paragraph. Sometimes it cites three or four businesses by name. Sometimes it cites none. If Dave isn't one of the cited names, he doesn't exist in that conversation. There is no page two to scroll to.
That's the first structural difference. SEO is click-based. GEO is answer-based. If the model's answer doesn't include you, you lose — quietly, with no analytics dashboard ringing the alarm.
The second difference is how the engines decide who to cite. Keywords don't matter the way they used to. What matters is entity clarity — whether the AI can confidently say "Dave's Plumbing is a real business, located in Scarborough, that specializes in heritage properties, and multiple trustworthy sources confirm this." Keywords get you in a search index. Entities get you into a sentence.
The blunt way I explain it to clients: Google wants to know what page to show. ChatGPT wants to know what to say about you. Those are different questions, and they reward different things.
The overlap, and it's bigger than people think
Before I make this sound like you have to throw out your SEO work, hear me out. The foundations overlap almost entirely.
Both SEO and GEO reward:
- A fast site. If the crawler times out, neither Google nor GPTBot indexes you properly.
- Mobile-friendly pages. Both engines weight this.
- Structured data.
LocalBusinessschema helps Google understand your hours; it also helps AI models understand your entity. - Real reviews on third-party platforms.
- Consistent NAP (name, address, phone) across the web.
If you've already done real SEO, you're probably 60 to 70 percent of the way to being GEO-ready. The remaining 30 percent is where the new work lives.
What's actually different in the GEO playbook
For Dave, we did four things that pure SEO wouldn't have prioritized:
- Rewrote his About page as a factual entity profile. Not marketing copy. Plain facts: founded 2013, covers YO11 and YO12 postcodes, specializes in pre-1940 properties, certified with WaterSafe. AI models strip away adjectives and keep facts.
- Added specific service pages for narrow problems. "Cast iron pipe replacement Scarborough." "Lead pipe removal YO12." Not for Google's search volume — that's near zero. For GPTBot, which matches long-tail questions to narrow pages.
- Got him cited in third-party listicles. Two local blog posts and a Reddit thread that mentioned him by name as the old-house guy. AI models trust corroboration from outside your own site far more than claims on your own homepage.
- Added FAQ schema answering the actual questions people ask AI. Not "do you service Scarborough?" That's a keyword question. But "what does it cost to replace lead pipes in an older home?" — that's an AI question. If your page answers it directly, you become a citation candidate.
The numbers that tell the real story
Six months after we started monitoring Dave's AI citations on RankingLocal, the split was clear:
- Google rank for his main keyword: still position 1.
- Organic click-through: down 9 percent year over year.
- Citations in ChatGPT for "plumber Scarborough" variants: went from 0 to 6 out of 10 tested prompts.
- Citations in Perplexity: 4 out of 10.
- Citations in Google AI Overviews: 7 out of 10.
- New customers mentioning an AI tool in the first call: 14 percent, up from near zero.
Here's the uncomfortable part. If we had only watched Google, we'd have celebrated that position-1 ranking and missed the fact that his actual pipeline was shifting. SEO tools don't show you AI citations. That's the gap.
What to do on Monday morning
If you run a local business and you've been doing SEO for years, don't panic and don't tear it up. Keep the foundations. Then layer three GEO-specific habits on top:
- Audit your site for entity clarity. Can an AI read your homepage and state three concrete facts about you?
- Check your citations monthly. If you're not being mentioned when someone asks AI a question a customer would ask, you have a GEO problem that no amount of blue-link ranking will fix.
- Publish content that answers specific questions, not just content that targets keywords.
Dave is still the top blue link for emergency plumber Scarborough. He's also now the plumber ChatGPT recommends when someone asks about old houses. Two jobs, both done. That's where the market is heading for every trade business I work with.
If you want to see where you currently stand in AI answers for your area, I built a free checker at /free-tools/ai-visibility/ — it runs your business name through the major AI engines and tells you what they say, or don't. Takes about 90 seconds.
Questions, objections, or you want me to look at a specific case — hello@rankinglocal.ai is read by me directly.