GEO for Small Business, Simplified

That’s been one of the biggest things we’ve learned in beta. “AI visibility” makes sense once you explain it, but it isn’t yet a phrase most small business owners immediately recognize.

We’ve been shifting the language toward the actual question they care about: When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc. for a business like yours, can AI find you, understand what you do, and include you in the answer?

Then “AI visibility” becomes the shorthand for measuring that.

The interesting UX challenge has been explaining enough to make the problem click without making a small business owner feel like they need to learn an entirely new branch of marketing first. That’s really the reason we built GEO the way we did.

Thank you (!) and especially for taking the time to actually run the site through your tool. I really appreciate that.

I agree completely on the language problem. “Can AI read/find/understand your site?” is much closer to how we need to introduce this to an SMB than expecting someone to already know what GEO, citability, or AI visibility mean.

Where I’m probably even more bullish is on what happens to SEO itself. I don’t think it simply becomes less important - I think it gets fundamentally redefined.

For years, businesses have competed to rank in the top 10 results on Google. Increasingly, they’ll be competing to be one of the 2 or 3 businesses an LLM actually names in the answer.

That’s a much narrower window, especially for small businesses. If you’re #7 on Google, you may still get found. If an AI assistant gives the user three recommendations and you’re not one of them, you may effectively disappear from that decision.

A lot of the traditional fundamentals will still matter - crawlability, authority, structured information, strong source content - but the end goal changes from ranking for the click to being included in the answer.

And yes, absolutely open to comparing notes. This category is moving ridiculously fast, and I think there’s a lot we can learn from each other.

Thank you so much - and you absolutely nailed the transition. Building the product is only the first piece; suddenly you’re also doing onboarding, customer feedback, support, marketing, outreach, analytics, and trying not to lose sight of what you’re actually building in the first place. And, in our case, still running an agency during the day (Meet Inflection Point . com) - so trying to prioritize client work.

We’re officially live now, so it’s been a very full week - but also incredibly rewarding to finally get This Is GEO into people’s hands and start learning from real users, rather than friends, family and colleagues.

Really appreciate the kind words, and I’d be happy to connect. It sounds like you understand the founder chaos very well.

I think that’s exactly the tension, and I agree that the symptom has to come before the metric.

A small business owner may not wake up thinking, “I have an AI visibility problem.” They wake up thinking, “Why is the phone quieter?” or “Why are website inquiries down?” The score is useful once you’ve connected it to that outcome.

I think SMB owners may be more aware of the shift than we sometimes give them credit for.

I spent some time on the phone yesterday with a lifelong friend who’s renovating a new home, and he mentioned that every contractor he’s hired has asked him - sometimes more than once - how he found them or heard about them. That really stuck with me. They may be doing it in person as opposed to tracking Analytics, but they're absolutely aware of the shift.

I’ve seen the same thing talking with event vendors while building this. A lot of them are already dabbling in AI, and a few - including one particularly tech-savvy DJ - are investing in AI advertising on OpenAI as opposed to continuing their spend on Google. They may not use terms like GEO, but they’re absolutely noticing that discovery behavior is changing, and several have specifically mentioned differences in direct website inquiry volume this year.

So my sense is that the education gap isn’t always “AI search matters.” Increasingly, it’s “I know search is happening on LLMs, but I don’t know how to measure it or what to do about it.”

And that’s really the gap we’re trying to close. I think small business owners spend a lot more time educating themselves on these shifts than they’re often given credit for. They just may not have the skillset personally to manage website revisions or optimization, and they're hiring inexpensive web devs (unfortunately many I have spoken with have issues with money being taken and sites not completed, or redesigns being dragged on for months) who are either not solving the right problems, or who - because of past burns - have put them off to re-engaging a contractor for more headaches.

The onboarding challenge is translating what they’re already feeling into something concrete: “Here’s why you may not be showing up when someone asks ChatGPT for a business like yours - and here’s what you can actually do about it.”

Thank you - and I agree that “competing to be the answer” is probably the clearest way we’ve found to explain the shift.

One clarification on the $6K/month: we’re literally just launching publicly this week, including our Product Hunt launch, so that revenue isn’t coming from a mature self-serve funnel yet. It’s a combination of our more hands-on enterprise tier and early beta users/testers.

Right now we’re seeing roughly 100–200+ visitors a day, which is encouraging this early, but we’re still very much at the stage of learning what happens between curiosity, running the scan, setting up a workspace, and actually becoming an ongoing user.

That conversion path is probably the thing I’m watching most closely right now.

We’ve only just started the broader outreach push, so my hope is that as Product Hunt, directory listings, press, founder/community outreach, and direct SMB outreach start compounding, we’ll see the top of the funnel move up pretty quickly.

The interesting part for me isn’t just “can we drive traffic?” It’s whether we can make that first scan useful enough that a small business owner immediately understands: this is showing me something about how customers may—or may not—be finding me now. That’s the stickiness question we’re trying to solve.

Thank you - and congrats on what you’re building too. There’s so much surface area in this category right now that I think we’re going to see a lot of interesting approaches emerge.

I’d genuinely be interested in comparing notes, especially around agentic AI and WebMCP. We’ve been very focused on making AI search visibility understandable and actionable for non-technical businesses, so I’m always curious to see how others are approaching the more technical layers underneath it.

Appreciate you checking us out - and good luck with your launch as well!