Type "best plumber near me" into Google today and there is close to a coin-flip chance you will not see ten blue links. You will see an AI Overview: two or three businesses, summarised, with the answer already written for you. Google's own figures put AI Overviews on 48% of searches as of early 2026, up from 31% a year earlier. A growing share of people skip search entirely and ask ChatGPT or Perplexity instead, "who's the best marketing agency in Cluj?" So the question for a local business is not "how do I rank first?" anymore. It's "how do I get mentioned in the answer?"
Local SEO did not get replaced, it got more important
I covered the structural side of GEO in an earlier post: answer-first content, clean structure, schema. None of that works in isolation for a local business, because AI engines lean on local trust signals to decide whether you are even worth citing. The basics I still check first on every local client:
- Google Business Profile fully filled out, real photos, a category that matches what the business actually does
- Consistent NAP (name, address, phone) across the website, GBP, and every directory listing
- Genuine reviews with some detail in them, not just a star rating
- Local mentions and backlinks from other businesses, local press, or chambers of commerce
None of this is new advice. What changed is that AI answer engines treat consistent, verifiable local information as a trust signal, not just a ranking signal.
What actually correlates with getting cited
A few things show up repeatedly in how these systems pick who to recommend.
Brand mentions across the web. Ahrefs found a 0.664 correlation between how often a brand gets mentioned elsewhere online and how often it shows up in AI Overviews. Getting written about, reviewed, or linked to matters more than it used to.
Third-party profiles. Businesses with active profiles on Trustpilot, G2, or Yelp are roughly three times more likely to get cited by ChatGPT as a source. If a client doesn't have these set up, it's usually a same-afternoon fix with an outsized payoff.
Reviews with substance. A one-line five-star review does less work than one that mentions what was actually done, because it gives the model something specific to lift.
“The businesses that show up in an AI answer are usually the ones that were already easy to verify. Fix the boring stuff first: NAP consistency, review profiles, a Business Profile that's actually complete.”
The checklist I run in order
If a client wants to start showing up in AI answers without a full site overhaul, this is the order I work through:
- Claim and fully complete the Google Business Profile
- Audit NAP consistency across the top 10-15 directory listings
- Set up or clean up a profile on Trustpilot, G2, or whatever review site is standard for that industry
- Rewrite the opening two to three sentences on the five most important pages to answer the question directly
- Add FAQ schema to those same five pages
- Ask the last ten happy clients for a review with a bit of specific detail in it
None of this needs new content or a redesign. It's mostly cleanup, and it's the highest-leverage work available right now precisely because most local competitors haven't done it yet.
What I don't recommend
Chasing every review platform at once, or paying for review volume. Both get flagged eventually, either by the platform or by the pattern being too clean to be real. Pick the one or two profiles that actually matter for the industry and build them properly.