GEO is how a business gets named in AI answers.

Speak Local shows you what other tools don’t: whether AI can read your site at all, and whether it says your name when your customers ask who to call.

GEO 25% of your score

Generative engine optimization: getting your business named in AI answers. It starts with access (whether GPTBot and ClaudeBot can fetch your pages), runs through entity clarity (whether AI knows exactly who you are), and ends in citations: how often ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini recommend you when your market asks.

See also: Local SEO · SEO · AEO · AIO

Read: What is GEO? · Does a local business need GEO?

Why GEO matters

AI answers name one or two businesses

Assistants return one or two names where a search page shows ten links. Those few names win most of the work, and almost nobody knows whether they’re among them.

Most AI crawler blocks are accidental

Firewalls, bot protection and CDN rules silently drop AI crawlers every day. The business owner never sees it. AI has nothing to read, so it recommends someone it can read.

AI answers change from week to week

AI answers are regenerated constantly, so a citation you hold today can be gone next week. Monitoring tells you when that happens, before your sales numbers do.

What Speak Local checks

Every scan measures and scores these, sorts them by priority, and re-checks them on schedule. See the full platform for how the pillars combine.

Crawler access: whether robots.txt, firewalls & CDNs let AI bots in
Rendering: content in raw HTML instead of behind JavaScript, which AI never runs
llms.txt: present, parses, and says something useful
Citation share of voice: how often AI answers name you vs. your rivals
LOCAL SEO AEO GEO AIO

Common questions

What’s the difference between GEO and AEO?
AEO makes you quotable, and GEO gets you cited. AEO is on-site work: schema, FAQs and answer-shaped content. GEO extends off-site: whether AI crawlers can access you, whether your entity is unambiguous, and whether generative engines name you in answers. You need both, which is why they’re separate pillars in the same score.
How do I know if AI can read my site?
You can’t tell from a browser. You have to fetch your pages the way the bots do. Speak Local requests your site as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot from the outside and reports exactly what each one gets back, because robots.txt saying “allowed” means nothing if a firewall drops the request.
What is llms.txt?
A plain-text file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that describes your site for language models: who you are, what you do, and which pages matter. It’s a young standard, but it’s cheap to publish, engines are starting to read it, and it’s one of the fastest fixes on most audit lists.
Should I block AI crawlers?
For most local businesses, no. If GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot can’t read your site, those assistants build their answer from everyone else’s pages. Blocking can make sense for a publisher protecting paid content, but a business that wants to be recommended wants to be read.
How long does GEO take to show results?
Technical fixes, like unblocking a crawler, can count the next time an assistant reads your site. Work that depends on reviews and listings elsewhere builds more slowly. Because answers vary from run to run, judge progress over several weeks of repeated checks, not a single test.
Do reviews matter for GEO?
Yes. Volume and recency show you’re an active business, but the words matter as much: a review that says “fixed our leaking water heater in Daphne the same afternoon” names a service, a place and an outcome an assistant can use. Ask customers to describe what you did, not just to leave stars.

We keep the answer word for word.

You get the full text, with your name marked inside it, every rival marked beside it, and the raw version one click below so you can check the rendering changed nothing.

ChatGPT “best roofer in Lexington KY” · 14 Sep

For roof replacement in Lexington, a few local companies come up consistently. Summit Roofing1 is frequently recommended for storm damage work and carries strong reviews across Google and BBB. Apex Exteriors2 is another established option, particularly for metal roofing. Homeowners also mention Bluegrass Home Co., though I don’t have details on their current service area.

you named rival citation confirmed the domain rival name read out of the prose only

Raw text and the model id that answered sit one click below in the app.

Four levels, from named to absent.

  • NamedRecommended by name in the answer.
  • CitedYour page is a source under the answer.
  • ConsultedRead, but not quoted back.
  • AbsentNot there at all.

The board reports the state held by two of the last three checks, so a one-week blip never shows up as a change. No assistant offers a seed that pins the index it searched, so this is one real check on one date, not a reproducible benchmark.