GEO and AEO for construction firms

It's a new layer on the same technical base, not a replacement. SEO still brings traffic from Google's list of results; GEO adds presence in AI answers, which increasingly intercept queries before the user reaches that list. They share requirements —speed, schema, authority— but GEO prioritises structured data, verifiable facts and citability.

Between 90 and 180 days depending on the competition in your trade and area. Models don't reindex in real time: they need to crawl your updated site, cross authority signals (Google Business Profile, mentions, video) and often wait for an update window. The signals that speed it up most: a consistent Google Business Profile, structured content with your own data, and not blocking AI crawlers.

At minimum GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity) and Google-Extended (Gemini and Google's AI overviews). Blocking these agents in robots.txt stops the model from knowing and citing your business. The standard governing that file is the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309).

Yes, and often more than for a national brand. When someone asks «emergency plumber in [your city]», the model tries to give concrete, local names. If your Google Business Profile is consistent, your site answers the question with verifiable data and you're not blocking crawlers, you're a candidate to appear in that answer.

It's a short block (60-120 words) that answers a question completely and self-containedly, placed at the start of the page. Generative engines do passage-level retrieval: they extract the fragment that best answers and cite it almost verbatim. A page that opens by answering —rather than with a marketing paragraph— is far more likely to be that cited fragment.

Yes. schema.org isn't about the machine «understanding» the text, but about not having to guess: it explicitly declares what your business is, which services you offer, where you operate and what your customers say. Marking up LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage and Review reduces ambiguity and raises the chance that both Google and AI engines use your data confidently.

The evidence suggests so. An Ahrefs analysis of 75,000 brands (December 2025) found a 0.737 correlation between YouTube presence and how often an LLM cites that brand. For a construction firm, a few well-structured videos —job process, before and after, FAQ on video— reinforce your citability.

With three families of metrics: presence (are you cited in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI overviews for your key queries?), referral traffic from those engines (visible in analytics as sources like chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai) and business impact (calls, forms and attributable visits). We track a panel of real queries for your trade and area every month.

Entirely. GEO works with your public content and structured data, not with customers' personal data. The AI part that does touch customer data —like a phone receptionist— is configured separately with a lawful basis, secure hosting and data minimisation. UK GDPR doesn't ban AI: it requires a lawful basis, transparency and control over the data.