SEO vs GEO, Part 3: The Playbook

Part 1 explained what changed. Part 2 showed what the evidence says actually moves citations. This one is the order of operations.

It is written for a business with one location, no marketing department, and a few hours a week. If that is not you, most of it still applies — you will just move faster.

Week 0: Find out where you actually stand

Before fixing anything, measure. Otherwise you will not know if any of this worked.

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google. Run the same five prompts in each:

1. "best [your trade] near [your town]"
2. "who should I call for [your main service] in [your city]"
3. "[your business name]"
4. "[your business name] reviews"
5. "[a specific service you want to be known for] [your town]"

Screenshot every answer. Date the file. That is your baseline, and in 90 days it is also the only honest proof that anything changed.

Pay attention to three things: are you named at all, is what it says about you correct, and who is named instead of you.

That last one matters most. The competitors showing up are not necessarily better shops. They are shops the machine is more confident about.

Week 1: Entity clarity (the boring one that pays)

This is the cheapest work on the list and the most skipped.

Pick your canonical identity. Write it down once:

• Exact business name, as you want it everywhere
• Exact address format, down to whether it is "Ste 4" or "Suite 4"
• One phone number
• Your hours

Then make every listing match it, character for character. Google Business Profile, website, Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook, BBB, chamber directory, supplier shop-locators, old directory listings you forgot about.

Search your own phone number in quotes to find listings you did not know existed.

Why it pays: when a machine cannot confidently resolve which business you are, it hedges — and hedging means naming somebody else.

Week 2: The profile, properly

Your Google Business Profile does more local work than your website. Complete every field, pick the right primary category, itemize your services, add real photos, fill in the Q and A yourself, and set holiday hours.

Google states plainly that complete and accurate information makes you more likely to show up. Take the free win.

Week 3: Reviews, and the asking system

Review volume and rating feed prominence directly. More importantly for AI visibility, reviews are text that other people wrote about you, on a domain you do not own — which Part 2 showed is the kind of source these systems lean on.

• Ask every happy customer, every time, with a direct review link
• Never offer anything in exchange — against Google policy and FTC rules
• Ask them to mention the specific work. Specific reviews survive filtering and persuade better
• Reply to all of them, in your own voice, within a couple of days
• Pace it. Fifteen reviews in one day on a profile that had none looks exactly like what it looks like

Weeks 4 to 12: Get mentioned somewhere you do not own

This is the actual lever and it is the slowest, so start it now and let it run.

Part 2 covered the research: brand mentions correlated far more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks did, and the citation pool is dominated by earned and third-party sources rather than company-owned pages.

For a local shop, in rough order of effort:

• Chamber of commerce — membership, directory listing, member spotlight
• Supplier and manufacturer locators — paint suppliers, I-CAR, certification programs. Free, authoritative, and most shops never claim them
• Local news and community papers — they run business features constantly and are starved for material
• Industry trade press — pitch a contributed article, not a press release
• Community forums and local groups — answer questions genuinely. Do not drop links. Your name in a helpful answer is worth more than a URL in a spam comment
• One video a month — a transcript is indexable text, and video platforms are among the most-cited domains in AI search

What to skip

Skip chasing schema as a citation strategy. Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages adding JSON-LD against 4,000 controls and found no meaningful citation lift. Ship it once because it helps rich results and entity recognition, then stop thinking about it.

Skip paying anyone for llms.txt. Google's John Mueller said in June 2025 that no AI system currently uses it. Put one up if you want — it costs an hour — but it is a bet on the future, not a lever today.

Skip press release wires. An analysis of over a million cited links found press releases made up about 6% of citations. Bad return.

Skip keyword stuffing permanently. In generative engine testing it scored worse than making no changes at all.

How to tell a real vendor from a bad one

You are going to get pitched. Here is the filter.

Ask what they will change and why. If the answer is a list of technical deliverables with no mechanism attached, keep looking.

Ask them to show you a before-and-after of someone being named in an AI answer. Not traffic. Not rankings. Named.

Ask what they would tell you to skip. Anyone who says everything in their package is essential is selling a package, not a diagnosis.

Be suspicious of guarantees. Nobody controls what a generative model says. Anyone promising guaranteed ChatGPT placement is either lying or does not understand the system.

Watch for invented urgency. "AI is going to make your website obsolete by Christmas" is a sales tactic. The real timeline is measured in quarters.

Day 90: Measure the same way you started

Run the identical five prompts. Same wording, same platforms. Compare to your dated screenshots.

You are looking for: named where you were not, described more accurately, appearing for more of the five.

If nothing moved, the usual cause is that weeks 4 to 12 never actually happened. Entity cleanup and profile work are necessary and not sufficient. The mentions are the part that moves the needle, and they are the part that takes real effort.

"None of this is clever. It is a sequence, done in order, by somebody who actually does it. The clever version is what people sell when they do not want to do the boring part." — Jamie Weaver, Founder

October: 20% off setup

Through October 31, 2026, 20% off the setup fee on any Incepta package for agreements signed this month. Monthly rates stay as published.

Core Presence 1,500 becomes 1,200 · Smart Presence 3,500 becomes 2,800 · Elite 6,000 becomes 4,800 · Luxe quoted individually

You can run this whole playbook yourself. It is written so you can. If you would rather see where you stand before deciding anything, the free AI visibility audit is free, has no pitch, and is yours either way.