Your next customer might never look at a results page. They ask ChatGPT for a recommendation, or Google's AI Overview answers the question before the listings appear, and only a handful of businesses get named. Generative engine optimisation, GEO for short, is the work of becoming one of them. AI search for local business is still young, which is exactly why it deserves your attention now: the businesses AI models learn to trust early tend to keep getting recommended whilst everyone else wonders where the calls went.
What AI search for local business actually looks like
The shift is behavioural before it is technical. People now ask assistants complete questions: "who is a reliable emergency electrician near Preston that answers after hours?" The reply is a recommendation with reasons, not ten blue links. Google's AI Overviews sit above the traditional results for many question-style searches, and voice assistants increasingly return a single suggestion rather than a list.
For a local business the stakes are concrete. Traditional results show a map and a list, so you could rank fifth and still get the call. AI search often names two or three businesses with a sentence of justification each, and there is no page two. Being one of the named few is the new version of ranking, and it is winnable, because AI search leans on signals you can directly influence.
Your Google Business Profile is feeding the machines
When an AI assistant recommends a plumber, it is not conjuring an opinion from nowhere. It draws on the sources it can read and verify, and for local questions that means Google's own local data, mapping platforms, directories and review sites. Your Google Business Profile is the most structured, machine-readable fact sheet about your business that exists: categories, services, service areas, hours, photos and reviews, all in a format machines are built to digest.
An incomplete profile is no longer just a weak map listing; it is a gap in the data AI reads. Every field you complete becomes a fact a model can repeat with confidence. Our complete guide to Google Business Profile optimisation covers the full checklist, and every item on it now works twice: once for the map, once for AI search.
A useful way to think about it: Google ranks you, AI describes you. Everything public about your business, your profiles, your reviews, your website copy, is raw material for that description. Make sure it says what you want repeated.
Reviews are what AI recommendations run on
Ask an assistant for "the best" anything and it justifies the answer with reputation: consistently praised for turning up on time, reviewers mention tidy work and fair pricing. Those phrases are synthesised from real reviews. Where a human skims a star rating, a language model reads the text, and that changes what a good review is worth. Detailed reviews that mention the service, the suburb and the outcome hand AI recommendations exact sentences to quote.
The playbook follows from that. Build a steady flow of recent, specific reviews, reply to all of them professionally, and encourage customers to say what was done and where. Volume helps, but recency and specificity are what make your business quotable.
GEO builds on the local SEO you already do
Here is the reassuring part: none of this replaces local SEO. It compounds it. The same consistent name, address and phone details, the same suburb-specific service pages, the same schema markup: AI systems lean on all of it when deciding which businesses exist, where they operate and whether they can be trusted.
What GEO adds is a preference for plain, quotable language, because AI search rewards content that answers questions the way people ask them. A page that plainly answers "how much does gutter cleaning cost in Geelong and what affects the price" is far easier for a model to cite than a wall of sales copy. Keep the foundations, then write like you talk: FAQ sections, straight answers, real prices where you can commit to them. Trades businesses are especially well placed here, because their customers ask AI exactly these questions; it is a natural extension of our SEO for tradies work. For the broader theory behind all of this, our guide to what GEO is goes deeper.
Where to start with AI search this month
You do not need a new retainer to begin. Four moves cover most of the ground. First, finish your profile properly: every field, real photos, accurate services and hours. Second, build the review habit and reply to everything. Third, add a plain-language FAQ to each key service page answering the questions customers actually ask, prices included where you can stand behind them. Fourth, measure: run our free AI Visibility Checker to see whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews mention your business today, then re-check quarterly.
AI search moves quickly, but it rewards the same thing search always has: being a genuinely good business that is easy to verify. Do the work above and you are not chasing a trend, you are building the evidence machines and humans both trust.
Want a baseline before you start? The free visibility check takes about a minute and shows where your business already appears across the major AI search platforms, so you know exactly what to fix first.
