the geo wiki
Get your business recommended by AI
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of earning a place in the answers AI assistants give when buyers ask who to hire, where to go, and what to buy. This wiki documents how those answers are assembled — in general, and for 30 specific industries, from local trades to one-person practices.
Last updated
Where should I start with GEO?
Start with the fundamentals below — what GEO is, how it differs from SEO and AEO, how answers are assembled, how to measure honestly, and the standards behind this wiki — then jump to your industry’s guide for the vertical-specific sources and schema.
What is GEO?
Generative Engine Optimization from zero: the research, the evidence-backed tactics, and how to start.
GEO vs SEO
What carries over, what breaks, and how zero-click behavior changes what “winning” means.
AEO vs GEO
Answer boxes vs generated recommendations: where the two disciplines differ, where the terms blur, and which to prioritize.
How AI picks businesses
Model memory vs live retrieval, the sources answers are assembled from, and the crawlers that need access.
Measuring LLM visibility
Mention rates over a frozen question set, Wilson confidence intervals, and the numbers to refuse to trust.
llms.txt, honestly
An emerging convention with limited adoption today — what the data shows and when it is still worth doing.
How GEOExtension scores
Every readiness weight, visibility measure, confidence interval, failure rule, and limitation—published.
Editorial standards
How guides are sourced, reviewed, updated, corrected, and kept honest when AI-assisted workflows are used.
Which industries does this wiki cover?
Thirty verticals — from local trades to solo coaches and freelancers — each with representative buyer prompts, corroboration sources worth maintaining, relevant schema.org types, and a prioritized action checklist.
home & trade services
health & wellness
professional & financial services
consumer & local
solopreneurs & independents
Why does GEO deserve attention now?
Because buyer discovery has already moved: clicks from classic search keep falling while AI assistants answer hundreds of millions of people weekly. Three independently verifiable data points set the scene — every stat on this wiki is linked to its source.
- 8% vs 15%Google users clicked a traditional result link on only 8% of searches that showed an AI summary, versus 15% without one — and clicked a source cited inside the summary just 1% of the time. Pew Research Center, July 2025
- 900M weekly usersChatGPT reached roughly 900 million weekly active users in early 2026, more than doubling from about 400 million a year earlier. TechCrunch, February 2026
- 4.4x valueThe average visitor arriving from an AI search source converts at roughly 4.4 times the value of a traditional organic search visitor. Semrush, 2025
Frequently asked questions
What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
GEO is the practice of making a business more likely to be named and recommended in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity — by fixing crawler access, structuring content as direct answers, and building presence on the sources assistants cite.
Who is this wiki for?
Business owners, solopreneurs, freelancers, and marketers who want to appear when buyers ask AI assistants who to hire or buy from. Guides assume no technical background but include the exact schema types and checks developers need.
Are the statistics on these pages real?
Yes — every figure links to a verifiable public source (Pew Research Center, Adobe Analytics, Semrush, peer-reviewed GEO research). If we cannot verify a number, we do not publish it. That is also the sourcing standard we recommend for your pages.
Do these pages practice what they preach?
They are built to: question-form headings with direct answers, Article and FAQPage structured data, visible update dates, cited sources, and AI crawlers explicitly welcomed in robots.txt. Run any page through the free audit and check.
see where you stand
Is AI already recommending your business?
Run the free audit to check any page against the 21 GEO signals this wiki teaches — no account or API keys. Then use one managed probe to measure whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity actually mention your business.