Is your company recommended by ChatGPT? A GEO guide for South Shore SMBs
Your prospects ask AI their questions. It answers with two or three names, not ten links. Here is how to be one of the names it cites.
What changed in how you get found
For twenty years, being found meant showing up in the top ten Google results. That reflex is shifting. When someone asks an AI "best garage near Saint-Constant" or "who can build an internal app for my company", the answer is not a list of links. It is two or three names, with a short justification. If your company is not one of them, it does not exist in that conversation.
In Québec, the shift is already massive. According to the NETendances 2025 survey by the Académie de la transformation numérique at Université Laval, 84% of AI tool users go through ChatGPT. Your prospects are already asking these tools their questions.
GEO, explained plainly
GEO, for Generative Engine Optimization, is the set of practices that make your company readable, verifiable and citable by AI engines. SEO made you appear in a list. GEO gets you cited in an answer. The two work together: the technical foundations of good SEO stay essential, but AI engines add their own requirements: clear facts, consistent sources, and content structured as questions and answers.
Why local SMBs have a card to play
Reference content in French is still thin in many sectors. When an AI looks for a reliable French answer about a local service and finds nothing solid, it falls back on what it can find, often bigger players, sometimes foreign ones. That is a threat for those who do nothing. It is a window for those who structure their presence now, while the ground is still open.
The seven foundations of a citable company
- Clean page titles and descriptions that say who you are, what you do and where.
- One clear topic per page, with a unique main heading.
- Structured data (Schema.org): your company, your services, your address, readable by machines.
- Consistent contact details everywhere: same name, same address, same phone on your site, your Google listing and your social profiles.
- One page per service, written to answer a real customer question.
- An honest FAQ: AI engines love citing short, clear answers.
- Real, recent customer reviews.
How to know where you stand
That is exactly what our GEO Scorecard measures: an analysis of your site on those foundations, a score out of 100, and the three priority actions for your situation. The analysis is automated and comes with no strings attached.
FAQ
Does GEO replace SEO?
No. GEO builds on the same technical foundations as SEO and adds a layer: making your content citable by AI engines. A site that ranks poorly on Google will rarely be cited by an AI.
How long until we see results?
Technical fixes land in a few weeks. Presence in AI answers builds progressively after that, at the pace where engines revisit and cross-check your content.
Is this only for large companies?
The opposite. On local queries, a well structured SMB can be cited ahead of a large generic player, because the precise local answer is more useful to the engine.