Malau Digital handles SEO and GEO for established local businesses in the San Gabriel Valley. This post is for owners in El Monte, West Covina, Covina, Baldwin Park, and the surrounding SGV who keep hearing the term GEO and want to know whether it’s something to act on or something to ignore.
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization: getting your business cited when someone asks an AI tool like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini for a local recommendation. It’s the same instinct as SEO, pointed at a different surface: the paragraph an AI hands back to your customer.
For most established SGV businesses, this is a small but growing share of how new customers find you. The honest answer about whether you should care: probably yes, soon, and the work to be ready is cheaper now than it will be in a year.
What GEO actually is
When a customer types “best tax preparer in Covina” into ChatGPT, they don’t get a list of links. They get a paragraph. That paragraph is built from pages an AI engine has read, scored for usefulness, and pulled into its answer. If your business shows up in that paragraph, it’s because a crawler from that AI engine found your site, understood what you do and where, and judged the page worth citing.
GEO is the practice of making sure your site is one those crawlers can read, understand, and want to cite. It’s a different job than ranking on a Google results page, and it’s done a little differently.
A quick note on Google, since the terminology gets muddy
In May 2026, Google published official guidance titled “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search.” Their position, in their own words: “From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.” Google goes further and says AEO and GEO aren’t separate disciplines from SEO at all — from their perspective. For Google’s surfaces specifically, that’s mostly accurate. Whatever helps you rank in regular Google search also feeds Google’s AI surfaces.
When I talk about GEO, I’m talking about the other engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Google’s guidance covers Google Search only, and those engines run on different crawlers with different priorities. Cloudflare’s own data shows GPTBot (OpenAI) and ClaudeBot (Anthropic) among the most active AI crawlers on the web, with GPTBot’s share of bot traffic more than doubling in the year to mid-2025 and ClaudeBot growing alongside it. That’s the slice GEO is actually about: being visible to the engines a growing share of your customers are using alongside Google.
Why it matters now and not later
There’s an inconvenient fact about AI crawlers: they don’t re-visit the way Google does. The training crawlers behind these AI engines typically do one deep pass over a new site and come back less often than you’d expect. If your site isn’t complete and clearly structured when they first show up, the version they index is the version that sits in those models for a long time. A site that adds important content six months after launch may not get re-read for a while.
That’s the practical reason GEO matters now. Doing the work after launch is harder than doing it before, and a small business doesn’t get many chances to make a first impression on an AI engine.
What it actually looks like for a small SGV business
The basics are unglamorous and they work. The site needs to be fully crawlable by these engines, which means your robots.txt allows ClaudeBot, GPTBot, and the other major AI crawlers instead of blocking them by accident. Each service page needs to say in plain text what the service is, who it’s for, and where it’s offered. The homepage needs to link out to every important page, since AI crawlers rely heavily on internal links to find the rest of your site. Structured data (LocalBusiness, Service, and FAQPage schema) needs to be in place before launch, since that’s what gives the engine a clean way to read what your business is.
None of that is exotic. It’s the same kind of careful build the foundation SEO post describes, with one extra layer for the AI engines on top.
Should you do GEO now
If your site is brand-new, yes, do it as part of the build. The cost of adding it later is much higher than the cost of doing it now. If your site has been live for years and you’re already working on local SEO, treat GEO as the next layer up: worth planning, not an emergency. If you don’t even have a Google Business Profile claimed yet, start there first. The foundation has to be there before the upper layers do anything.
GEO is real and worth doing. There’s no magic to how it works, and most of it overlaps with the careful build any good site should already have. If you’d like someone to look at where your site currently stands on the GEO side, the services page covers what I do for businesses across the San Gabriel Valley.