What is GEO — and does it matter for a trades business?

GEO — generative engine optimization — is the work of making your business the one AI tools name when a customer asks who to call. Where SEO earns you a ranking on a results page, GEO earns you a citation inside the answer itself: the paragraph ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI mode writes when someone asks “who's a good electrician near me?” or “how much should a basement renovation cost?”

Why this matters for trades businesses specifically

Homeowners increasingly start with a question, not a search. They ask an AI assistant what a fair price is, whether a symptom is urgent, and — critically — who they should call. Those answers typically name two or three businesses. There is no page two. Either you're in the answer or you don't exist for that customer.

The window matters too: most trades businesses aren't doing GEO at all yet. In competitive categories where everyone has done basic SEO for a decade, GEO is where a local operator can still get ahead of the market instead of catching up to it.

How AI tools decide which businesses to name

Answer engines name businesses they can verify. Under the hood they cross-reference what your website claims against your Google Business Profile, your reviews, directories and every other mention of you they can find. Four things consistently improve whether you're citable:

• Consistent facts. The same name, services, area and contact details everywhere machines look.
• Structured data. Schema markup that states in machine-readable form who you are, what you do and where — so nothing is left to inference.
• Answer-shaped content. Pages that ask the customer's question and answer it directly in the first sentence. AI systems quote content built like this; they skip marketing prose.
• Real proof. Recent reviews, real job photos, verifiable results. AI tools weight trust signals heavily because their own credibility depends on not recommending duds.

Does GEO replace SEO?

No — it compounds it. The same crawlers that feed AI answers read the same pages Google ranks, and most AI search still leans on traditional indexes underneath (ChatGPT's web search runs on Bing's, for instance). Clean technical foundations, specific service pages and strong local signals feed both systems at once. That's why we treat SEO and GEO as one system, not two services.

What a trades business should actually do

1. Get the fundamentals right first — the five fixes here feed both SEO and GEO.
2. Add structured data for your organization, services and FAQs.
3. Rewrite key pages so each real customer question gets a direct, quotable answer.
4. Systematise reviews and job proof — the verification layer AI leans on.
5. Watch your server logs for AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) — you can literally see whether the AI ecosystem is reading you.