SEO is still the foundation.

Classic search still drives the traffic. AI assistants learn who you are from the same site Google crawls, so SEO work now pays off in both places.

SEO 25% of your score

Search engine optimization: ranking in classic Google through technical health, content that covers what you sell, and the authority signals search engines weigh. AI assistants now build their picture of your business on the same base.

See also: Local SEO · AEO · GEO · AIO

Why SEO still matters

Classic search still sends the most customers

AI answers are growing fast, but classic search remains the biggest single source of customers for local businesses. It’s the pillar that pays the bills, so keep monitoring it.

AI learns about you from your site

GPTBot and other AI crawlers read the same pages Googlebot does. Thin content, broken pages and missing information cost you rankings and also leave AI with nothing accurate to say about you.

Speed and crawlability come first

A page that can’t be fetched cleanly can’t rank, be quoted or be cited, so fixing speed and crawlability helps all three.

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.

Technical health: speed, mobile, indexability, crawl errors
Rankings: your money keywords, tracked over time
Content coverage: depth on the services that make you money
Authority: a 0-100 link score with the four numbers behind it, computed the same way for rivals
LOCAL SEO AEO GEO AIO

Common questions

Is SEO still worth it in the AI era?
Yes, more than ever, though it is no longer the whole picture. AI engines cite sources that already rank well and read cleanly, so classic SEO work now pays off in two places at once. What’s changed is that rankings alone no longer tell you if you’re winning, which is why Speak Local scores SEO alongside AEO and GEO.
What SEO factors does Speak Local check?
Technical health (speed, mobile-friendliness, indexability, crawl errors), rankings for your market’s money keywords, content coverage on your services, and a 0-100 link authority score built from your referring domains. All of it feeds the SEO pillar, 25% of your score.
How long does SEO take to work?
Technical fixes register in days; content and authority build over weeks to months. Because results arrive gradually, Speak Local re-scans on a schedule and shows you the movement, so nobody has to guess whether the work is paying off.

Your authority score, with its four parts shown

One 0–100 number with the four inputs behind it printed next to it, so when a client asks why their score is 62, you have an answer they can check.

62Authority yourbusiness.com
  • Link power ×0.7 68
  • Reach 1,240 linking domains ×0.3 54
  • Spam penalty capped at 30% −4
  • Follow quality capped at 15% 0

Link power carries the most weight because it already accounts for the quality of the linking domains, which a raw count can’t. Both penalties are capped on purpose, so one supplier’s spam heuristic can’t halve your score. The same formula runs on every competitor you track, and a domain the index has never seen shows not measured instead of zero.

Google Search Console data, synced daily

Connect Search Console once and your clicks, impressions and positions arrive every day. It’s free and never touches your credit allowance. We store and label it separately from our own rank checks, because an impression-weighted average and a single observed position are different numbers and should never be blended. It also surfaces the pages that rank well but get almost no clicks, which usually means an AI Overview is answering above you.