AI Search Optimisation (GEO) for businesses in St Albans & Hertfordshire
Get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity — not just listed in Google's blue links.
What is AI search optimisation?
AI search optimisation — also called generative engine optimisation (GEO) or answer engine optimisation (AEO) — is the work of making your business easy for AI assistants to find, understand, trust and cite. When someone asks ChatGPT "who's the best accountant in St Albans?" or Google shows an AI Overview, the answer is built from a handful of sources. GEO is how you become one of them.
Why it matters now
- Buyers increasingly start with a question to an AI assistant instead of a list of search results.
- AI answers usually name only a few businesses. Being one of them is worth more than ranking on page two.
- Ranking well on Google no longer guarantees you appear in AI answers — they use different signals, so they need separate work.
- Microsoft now reports how often sites are cited in Copilot and Bing AI answers (Bing Webmaster Tools, 2026) — AI visibility is becoming a measurable channel.
SEO vs GEO: what's the difference?
| Traditional SEO | AI search optimisation (GEO) | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank a page in search results | Be named or cited in an AI-generated answer |
| Unit | Keywords and pages | Questions, entities and facts about your business |
| Key signals | Links, relevance, page experience | Clear answers, consistent facts, third-party mentions, freshness, structured data |
| Measured by | Rankings, clicks | Citations, share of AI answers, brand mentions |
They overlap: good GEO is built on solid technical SEO. That's why we do both.
How we do it
Good GEO is mostly good SEO. We make sure the foundations are solid first — crawlable, fast, well-structured pages that rank — then focus on the three things that are specific to AI answers:
Make AI favour your brand
We test the questions your customers ask across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and Google AI Mode, see which businesses get recommended and why, then refine your pages so AI assistants pick you more often.
Fix what AI gets wrong about you
AI answers often contain errors or omissions — outdated services, wrong location, missing prices, a competitor's strengths credited to you or yours to them. We find them and correct the source content so they stop repeating.
Plug your citation and mention gaps
We find the sites, directories, reviews and publications AI assistants cite for your topic where you're missing, and get you listed, reviewed or mentioned there.
Throughout, a person reviews every change. AI tools speed up the analysis; judgement about your brand stays human.
What you get
- A baseline report: which AI assistants recommend you, for which questions, what they get wrong, and which competitors appear instead
- A prioritised 90-day action plan
- SEO foundations checked and fixed: crawler access, schema, sitemaps, Bing and Google webmaster tools, IndexNow
- Rewritten key pages and new answer pages for your most valuable questions
- Monthly tracking of recommendations, errors and citations, with plain-English reporting
Who it's for
Local and regional service businesses in St Albans, Harpenden, Hatfield, Watford and across Hertfordshire and London — accountants, solicitors, clinics, trades, estate agents, B2B firms — plus UK e-commerce brands that want to be recommended when shoppers ask AI for products.
AI search optimisation FAQ
Is GEO different from SEO?
Yes, but they overlap. SEO gets your pages ranked; GEO gets your business named in AI-generated answers. GEO needs clear, consistent facts, answer-first content and mentions on trusted third-party sites, on top of good SEO foundations.
Can you guarantee my business will appear in ChatGPT?
No one can honestly guarantee that — AI answers vary by question, user and day. What we can do is measure your visibility, fix what's holding you back and track the improvement month by month.
How long does it take to see results?
Technical and factual fixes can show up within weeks as assistants re-crawl your site. Building authority through reviews and mentions typically takes three to six months.
Does llms.txt help?
Only a little. Current data shows AI crawlers rarely request llms.txt and Google has said it doesn't use it. We add one because it's cheap, but we focus on what does work: crawlable HTML, clear answers, structured data and third-party mentions.
How much does it cost?
It starts with a fixed-price AI visibility audit, followed by an optional monthly retainer. Book a free strategy call and we'll quote for your situation.
Book a free 30-minute AI strategy call
We'll look at how your business works today, show you where AI can save time or win customers, and give you three things to do next — whether you work with us or not.