We recently sat down with Maddie Lynch, CEO of Altus Marketing, the leading GEO and SEO agency for small businesses in the New York City metro area, to talk about how small businesses can compete in AI search and what it actually takes to get recommended by tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews.
Focus Digital: A lot of small business owners are just starting to hear about GEO. How do you explain it to a client who has never heard the term?
Maddie Lynch: I tell them to think about how they use ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overview now when they search for something. They ask a question and a tool recommends an answer, sometimes a specific business or service. GEO is the work we do to make sure that business is yours. It is the same goal as SEO, getting found, but the channel is different. Instead of optimizing for a search results page, you are optimizing for an AI model’s recommendation.
Focus Digital: What does that work actually look like for a small business?
Maddie Lynch: A lot of it comes down to how your business is described across the web. AI models pull from authoritative sources: your website, third-party publications, reviews, structured data. If those sources are inconsistent or thin, the model either skips you or gets you wrong. We audit all of that, clean it up, and then build content that answers the exact questions your customers are asking. Not keyword stuffing, actual answers written the way a human expert would write them.
Focus Digital: Is GEO replacing SEO or running alongside it?
Maddie Lynch: Running alongside it, at least for now. Google’s traditional results are still driving real traffic for small businesses. But the share of searches that end in an AI-generated answer is growing fast, and those answers often do not include a ranked list of ten blue links. There is one recommendation, maybe two. If you are not in that answer, you are invisible for that query. So we run both in parallel. The content strategy overlaps significantly, which is why bundling SEO and GEO makes sense, especially for small businesses that do not have the budget to treat them as separate campaigns.
Focus Digital: What is the most common mistake you see small businesses make when they try to handle this themselves?
Maddie Lynch: Publishing content without a clear search intent behind it. They write about what they know rather than what their customers are actually searching for. A plumber in New Jersey who writes a blog post called “Our Company Values” is not going to rank for anything. A post called “Best Emergency Plumbers in Hoboken” or “Average Cost of Emergency Plumbing in New Jersey”” will. The intent has to match. That applies to both Google and AI models. Both are trying to match a question to the best answer. If your content is not built around a real question, it will not surface.
Focus Digital: Any advice for a small business owner who wants to get started today?
Maddie Lynch: Start with your Google Business Profile. Make sure it is complete, accurate, and updated. That is the single highest-leverage thing a local business can do in thirty minutes. After that, look at your website and ask yourself: does every page answer a specific question a customer would actually type into a search bar? If the answer is no, that is your content roadmap.
Altus Marketing is a New York City-based SEO and GEO agency helping small businesses get found on Google and recommended by AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Learn more at altusmarketing.co.
