What is GEO and does a small business need it?
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of structuring your website so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews cite your business when people ask questions. Small businesses benefit because a growing share of customers now ask an AI instead of scrolling search results. Every SiteExperts website is built GEO-ready as standard.
Traditional SEO tried to rank your site among ten blue links. GEO aims for something different: being named inside the answer an AI writes from scratch. This matters because customer behaviour is shifting fast. People increasingly ask an assistant "who builds cheap websites near me?" and act on the two-to-seven sources it cites, never visiting a results page at all. A GEO-ready site does a few concrete things: it answers real questions directly and near the top of the page, it publishes original data and clear facts an AI can lift, it names a real author for credibility, and it uses clean structured markup so machines understand each page. You do not abandon SEO — the fundamentals overlap. GEO simply extends good SEO into the way people now search. Because most small businesses have not started, the competitive window is unusually open right now.