How to Do GEO: Seven Ways to Get Your Business Into an AI’s Answer
The whole of GEO reduces to one thing: making your content a source an AI is willing to trust and finds easy to lift. Below are seven measures an Australian business can put in place without waiting for anything — none of them require a rebuild, and most of them are writing rather than engineering.
Seven ways to get quoted
- Answer first. Open every piece with a single sentence that states the conclusion, so a machine can take it cleanly.
- Lay out FAQs and structured Q&A. Write the questions customers actually ask, marked up as FAQPage schema.
- Firm up your entity details. Brand, address, category and social profiles (sameAs) consistent everywhere and checkable.
- Give it facts worth quoting. Specific numbers, processes and checklists get lifted; general enthusiasm does not.
- Build third-party mentions. Being named repeatedly in directories, review sites and press raises how far you are trusted.
- Look after your Google reviews. Genuine reviews are the main signal an AI reads when judging a local business.
- Structured data on clean, quick pages. Schema, a sensible heading hierarchy and fast loading, so the machine can get at it.
Seven items, and none of them is a trick. They amount to stating what you do clearly enough that a machine repeating it does not have to guess.
The step most people skip
Almost everyone concentrates on producing content and forgets entity credibility. When an AI recommends a local business, it cross-checks: does the Google Business Profile agree with the website, do the reviews look real, is the same name and address turning up consistently elsewhere? Contradictions are read as risk, and a risky source does not get quoted.
Which is the reason looking after your Google reviews is not a separate marketing exercise running alongside GEO. It is one of the load-bearing parts of it. A business with good content and a neglected profile is asking a machine to vouch for someone it cannot verify.
Where to start this week
If seven feels like a programme rather than a start, take three: state the answer first on your main service page, add three to five real questions with schema, and get the Business Profile and reviews into order. Those three carry most of the early movement, and the remaining four are easier once they are done.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need technical skills to do GEO?
You do not need to write code yourself. Content structure, FAQs, reviews and entity details are mostly configured by whoever looks after your site. What the business has to supply is accurate information and cooperation in collecting genuine reviews — neither of which can be outsourced.
Can GEO be measured?
Reasonably well, if you accept it is a composite. Watch whether your brand turns up in AI answers, whether traffic to the pages being cited changes, and how question-style keywords perform. No single number settles it, but the direction becomes clear over a couple of months.
What is the step most businesses skip?
Entity credibility. People concentrate on writing content and forget that when an AI recommends a local business, it cross-checks your Google Business Profile, your reviews and your mentions across the web for consistency. Which is why looking after your Google reviews is not adjacent to GEO — it is part of it.
What kind of content is easiest for an AI to quote?
Specific content. Numbers, processes, checklists and plain answers get lifted; adjectives and general enthusiasm do not. State the conclusion in the first sentence, keep the structure clean, and give the machine a passage with an obvious beginning and end.
What is AEO, exactly?
Work that gets ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers to cite you directly. It runs on question-and-answer content, structured data and trust signals (E-E-A-T).
What is structured data?
A machine-readable way of stating who you are, what you do, where you are and how you are regarded — so Google’s rich results and AI tools describe you accurately instead of guessing.
Why can’t customers find me?
Usually missing local terms, thin content, or technical problems underneath. Fix those three and the site comes back into view.
How long before the work shows results?
The technical and structural changes are crawled as soon as they are live. SEO and AI citations generally start within weeks, and evergreen content compounds month on month.
What is the difference between SEO and AEO?
SEO competes for a position in the results. AEO competes to be the source an AI quotes. Run both and you rank and get cited.
Roughly what does this cost?
It depends on whether content, SEO and AEO are inside the quote. Melmel does design and build with AEO and AI SEO from $1,000 a month, with no lock-in contract, and the $199 whole-site AI audit comes off your first month.
Local Sydney service · Bilingual AI studio · Melmel
Melmel builds and looks after Sydney websites — design, build and development — and does the AEO work that gets ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers citing you by name. Website design and build with AEO and AI SEO from $1,000 a month, with no lock-in contract. The $199 whole-site AI audit comes off your first month if you go ahead. English and Chinese. Phone 0473 034 777 · email kan@melmel.com.au.
