What AI answer engines do with your website.
Customers have started asking ChatGPT and Google's AI who the good electrician is. The answer names three businesses. Here is how those three get picked.
A year ago a search for electrician in Spring Hill returned ten links and a map. Increasingly it returns a paragraph. Google's AI answer, ChatGPT, and Perplexity read the web, decide who is worth recommending, and give the person one answer with two or three names in it. If you are not one of those names, you do not exist for that customer.
The trade is calling this GEO, generative engine optimization. The name is ugly but the work is not mysterious. The AI tools are doing something close to what a careful person would do if you asked them to find a good electrician: read the business's own site, check whether the facts line up elsewhere, look at the reviews, and see whether the business plainly says what it does and where.
What they read
Your website, in plain text. Not the design, not the photos. If the site says Quality Service You Can Trust and never says electrician, Spring Hill, or residential, the machine has nothing to work with.
Structured data. A small block of code on the site that states the business name, address, phone, hours, and services in a format machines read directly. Most local sites do not have it. It takes an hour to add.
Consistency. The AI checks whether your name, address, and phone match across Google, Yelp, Facebook, and the directories. Disagreement reads as unreliable.
Reviews, and what they say. Not the star count alone. A review that says they rewired our panel in Columbia in one day tells the machine three useful things.
What to do about it
Say plainly what you do and where, on every page, in words a person would use. Add the structured data. Fix the directories so they agree. Ask for reviews that describe the job. None of this is new, and all of it also helps the ordinary Map Pack ranking. The difference is that the AI answer is a shorter list than the map ever was, and the businesses on it will take a disproportionate share of the calls.
We include a GEO check in every free teardown: what the AI tools say about your business today, and what is missing.