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Free · No sign-up · Real AI test, not just a scan
We don't just scan your website — we actually ask a live, web-search AI who it would recommend for your industry and city, and check whether you show up.
GEO, in plain English
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practical work of making a business easier for Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity and other answer systems to discover, interpret and use when they answer a customer's question. It overlaps with SEO and local search, but the output we care about is not only a blue link: it is an accurate explanation, recommendation or citation.
There is no guaranteed “AI ranking button”. A good GEO programme fixes the fundamentals, publishes useful evidence, keeps local facts consistent, tests real prompts and measures whether visibility turns into qualified enquiries.
The practical funnel
Can a search or answer engine reach the important pages and read their content?
Are your category, services, location, hours and proof stated clearly and consistently?
Do independent sources, reviews, links and profiles corroborate that the business is real and current?
Does the content answer the exact situations and questions your customers ask?
Does an AI answer choose to mention or cite you for a particular query, at this moment?
Can you repeat the test and connect visibility with visits, enquiries and real business outcomes?
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The self-service GEO playbook
Work through these steps in order. You do not need to be a developer to complete the business and content work. For technical changes, use your website platform's documentation or ask your developer to follow the exact checks below. Keep a dated change log so you can tell what helped.
Write down ten questions a real customer might ask, not ten keywords. Include service, location and situation: “Who can repair a heat pump in Lower Hutt?”, “How much does a first-home valuation cost in Auckland?”, or “Which accountant helps small hospitality businesses?”
Claim and verify the profile. Use the most accurate primary category, add relevant services, current hours, phone, website, service area, photos and a plain-language description. Keep the website and profile facts aligned.
The first screen should make it obvious who you help, what you do, where you operate and what someone should do next. Create a useful page for each important service or location instead of hiding everything in vague brand copy.
Use HTTPS, a mobile-friendly layout, readable HTML, clear title and H1 tags, internal links, canonical URLs and a current sitemap. Check that important pages are not accidentally set to noindex or blocked in robots.txt.
Add JSON-LD where it is genuinely useful: the correct LocalBusiness subtype, Organization, Service and BreadcrumbList markup. Structured data helps machines interpret facts, but it is not a secret ranking boost and it must not contain claims hidden from visitors.
Make your business easy to corroborate. Align your name, address and phone on Google, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Yellow, Finda, relevant industry directories and active social profiles. Prefer a few trustworthy listings over dozens of low-quality ones.
Ask real customers for an honest review after a completed job. Never write reviews yourself, buy them, or pressure people to use particular words. Add case studies that explain the customer situation, work completed and measurable outcome.
Answer one meaningful question per page with a direct answer near the top, followed by context, steps, trade-offs, costs, timing, examples and sources. Add an author or business perspective where experience matters, and show when the information was last reviewed.
Use Google Search Console URL Inspection, a sitemap check, a robots.txt review, the Rich Results Test and a simple site search. Then ask the same ten questions in the AI products your customers use. Save the exact prompt, date, result and cited sources.
Prioritise the gap closest to a customer decision: an unclaimed profile, unclear service page, missing location detail, inconsistent phone number or unsupported claim. Let pages be crawled, then rerun the same test. Visibility is probabilistic, so measure trends rather than one lucky answer.
Copy, adapt, verify
Replace the brackets with real information. Do not copy a template word-for-word if it makes your business sound generic or introduces a claim you cannot prove.
Start with these prompt shapes, then make them specific to your customers.
Use this as a starting point for your homepage, About page or service page.
Keep important facts in visible page text. Add structured data only when it says the same thing.
Ask for useful detail, not a positive review or a particular keyword.
Ask genuine customers after genuine work. Never write, buy or incentivise reviews.
Record enough context to make the result repeatable.
Run the same set at least three times across several days. One answer is a snapshot, not a market position.
No hidden text or keyword stuffing. Write the facts for people and make them visible.
No fake reviews or listings. A larger footprint is not useful if the evidence is unreliable.
No mass-produced city pages. Only create a location page when you have genuinely useful local information.
No schema-only claims. Markup must describe visible, accurate content.
Do not block bots blindly. Review robots.txt and CDN rules before disallowing an AI crawler.
Do not confuse crawling with citation. Access makes discovery possible; it does not force an answer engine to cite you.
Paid GEO support is coming soon.
Research, translated for operators
GEO is moving quickly. The useful conclusion is not that every new tactic works; it is that discoverability is a chain of systems, and the quality of the evidence still matters. These are the sources behind the playbook.
Google Search Central
Google says there are no additional technical requirements or special schema needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Pages still need to be indexable, helpful, text-readable, internally linked and supported by good page experience. Business Profile and Merchant Center information should also stay current.
Read the sourceGoogle local search guidance
Google describes local results through relevance, distance and prominence. Complete, accurate Business Profile information, reviews and links can help prominence; there is no way to pay for a better organic local ranking.
Read the sourceGEO benchmark paper · 2023
Aggarwal and colleagues formalised Generative Engine Optimization and introduced GEO-bench. Their experiments reported up to a 40% visibility improvement for some strategies in their benchmark setting. This is a research result, not a promise of traffic, citations or rankings for every business.
Read the sourceCritical survey · 2026
A recent survey describes GEO as a partially observable pipeline involving crawling, retrieval, context allocation, citation, prominence, factual absorption and user behaviour. It finds topical relevance and context position more reproducible than generic “write this way” tricks, and warns that cross-platform evidence is still limited.
Read the sourceCitation absorption study · 2026
A study of 602 prompts and more than 21,000 search-layer citations found meaningful differences between engines. Higher-influence pages tended to be longer, more structured and semantically aligned, with definitions, numbers, comparisons and procedural steps. Citation breadth and citation depth are not the same thing.
Read the sourceNew Zealand SME research
MBIE research on New Zealand SMEs points to uneven AI confidence and recurring barriers such as lack of knowledge, uncertainty and risk. Around half of businesses report using AI, while many believe they would benefit from stronger digital capability. That is why this page is designed as a do-it-yourself operating guide.
Read the sourceWhat Actually Determines AI Visibility
GEO isn't one setting you flip. It's a combination of technical signals on your own site and independent corroboration everywhere else. Here's the full breakdown of what we actually look at.
What your website itself needs to say, in a format AI crawlers can actually parse.
schema.org structured data
JSON-LD LocalBusiness / Organization / Product markup — explicit, machine-readable facts (name, category, address, hours, price range) rather than facts buried in prose.
AI crawler access (robots.txt)
GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and CCBot must not be disallowed — many sites block these by accident via a blanket rule.
sitemap.xml coverage
Every page that should be discoverable needs to be listed and current — stale or partial sitemaps quietly hide content from crawlers.
llms.txt
An emerging plain-language summary file written specifically for AI systems, separate from human-facing content — most businesses don’t have one yet.
Clear, quotable factual statements
AI models lift text almost verbatim when it’s specific and self-contained (e.g. "the only free, dedicated local platform for X in Y") — vague marketing copy gives the model nothing concrete to cite.
Page speed & crawlability
Heavy client-side rendering or slow load times can cause a crawl to time out or return incomplete content before it ever reaches the model.
What independent, third-party sources need to confirm about the business — AI weighs this as heavily as the website itself.
Google Business Profile
Claimed, fully completed, with an accurate category and current hours — the single highest-leverage off-site signal for local queries.
NAP consistency
Name, Address, Phone must match exactly across the website, Google Business Profile, and every directory listing — mismatches actively erode trust signals.
Directory listings
Yellow, Finda, Neighbourly, Localist and industry-specific directories — each one is an independent data point corroborating that the business is real and current.
Review volume, recency & response rate
A handful of recent, genuine reviews — with the owner responding — signals an active, trustworthy business far more than review count alone.
Backlinks from authoritative NZ sources
Mentions or links from local news, industry associations, or established directories carry more weight than generic, low-quality backlinks.
Social presence
An active, current Facebook or Instagram page gives AI another independently-verifiable confirmation the business is genuinely operating today.
When Google's AI Mode was asked “AI business valuation tool nz,” it returned a result that included OpenBiz among the options for New Zealand business valuation. We're sharing it as an illustration of how AI search can surface a business — results vary by query, location and time. The same kinds of discoverability signals are what this check helps you understand. See the screenshots on the homepage.
Want to understand how your business appears?
Run the free check above and use the public playbook to make your first improvements. Our hands-on implementation service is planned, but not available for purchase or booking yet.