What is GEO in digital marketing? Location vs AI search

What is GEO in digital marketing? It is one acronym for two unrelated jobs. Geo marketing reaches people based on where they are, through location-targeted ads, geofences and local SEO. Generative engine optimization, the newer meaning, gets your brand named and your pages cited when ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews write an answer.

The two share three letters and very little else. A geo marketing manager decides which postcodes see an ad. A GEO specialist checks whether AI crawlers can read the site and whether AI answers mention the brand. Which one you are reading about usually shows within a sentence, and the table further down lists the clues.

Geo marketing is location-based marketing

Geo marketing, also written geomarketing, uses location to decide who sees a message, what it says and where the budget goes. Part of it is planning, such as choosing which cities to launch in or where to open the next store. The part most marketers touch every week is targeting, and three terms cover nearly all of it.

What is geotargeting?

Geotargeting shows an ad, or a version of a page, only to people in a chosen place or interested in it. In Google Ads it is the Locations setting on a campaign, and Google's location targeting help page lists what you can pick. That covers whole countries, regions, cities or postal codes depending on the country, and a radius of at least 1 km around an address.

A typical setup for a plumber who serves one city looks like this:

1. Target the postcodes you serve, or a radius around your base that covers them.
2. Exclude the areas inside that radius you don't cover.
3. Change the location option from Presence or interest to Presence.
4. After a few weeks, check where clicks came from and cut the areas that click but never call.

Step 3 is the one people miss. Presence or interest is Google's recommended option for Search, and it also reaches people elsewhere who have shown interest in your area, like someone in London planning a weekend in Leeds. A hotel wants those people. A plumber pays for clicks that can never become a job.

Google's own API calls each targetable place a geo target constant, with a numeric ID such as 2724 for Spain. In an ad tool, "geo" always means a location.

What is geofencing?

Geofencing draws a virtual boundary around a real place and triggers something when a phone crosses it. On Android, an app defines a geofence with a latitude, a longitude and a radius, and the system reports when a device enters it, leaves it or stays inside, according to Google's Android geofencing guide. The same guide recommends a radius of at least 100 to 150 meters, because Wi-Fi location is only accurate to about 50 meters.

In marketing, a geofence might trigger a push notification from a retailer's app as you walk past the store, or add your phone to an ad audience because it was seen at a trade show or a competitor's car lot. Targeting people at a competitor's location has its own name, geo-conquesting.

The difference from geotargeting is scale and timing. Geotargeting picks a region and shows ads to anyone in it. Geofencing reacts to a device entering one small, specific site. Google Ads won't draw a radius under 1 km, so a fence around a single building needs an app or an ad platform that works at that scale.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the unpaid side of geo marketing. It targets the map results and the local pack that Google shows for searches like "dentist near me" or "dentist in Leeds". Google's Business Profile help says local results rank mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and that there is no way to pay for a better local ranking.

The work is a complete Google Business Profile, the same name, address and phone number everywhere the business is listed, reviews, and a page on your site for each location you serve. LocalBusiness markup on those pages states the address, phone, coordinates and opening hours in a form machines read. Our Local Business Schema Checker tests that markup and confirms the address and phone also appear on the page.

What is generative engine optimization?

Generative engine optimization is the work of getting a site's content used, cited or named when an AI system writes an answer instead of returning a list of links. The term comes from the paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Pranjal Aggarwal of IIT Delhi and five co-authors, three of them at Princeton. It was posted to arXiv in November 2023 and accepted at KDD 2024. The authors called Bing Chat, Google's Search Generative Experience and Perplexity "generative engines" because they search first and then write one response from several sources.

The team built a benchmark of 10,000 queries and tested nine ways of rewriting a source page. Adding quotations, statistics and citations to other sources did best, and the abstract reports visibility gains of up to 40%. Keyword stuffing scored below the unedited page. Their main test engine was gpt-3.5-turbo answering from the top five Google results, plus a 200-query check on Perplexity, so read the numbers as a direction, not a forecast for today's ChatGPT.

The methods, results and a full checklist are in our guide to generative engine optimization.

What generative engine optimization involves for a website

For a website, GEO is mostly SEO plus a handful of extra checks. Google's guide to its generative AI features says optimizing for them is still SEO. The extra checks are:

• AI search crawlers can fetch your pages. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, apart from navigational links. A CDN bot rule can block it as easily as robots.txt can.
• The content exists in the HTML your server returns. A December 2024 analysis by Vercel, done with MERJ, found that none of the major AI crawlers rendered JavaScript, Gemini excepted because it uses Googlebot's infrastructure.
• Each section opens with a direct answer and backs it with a number or a named source, which is what the paper's top methods do.
• Your brand reads as one entity, with one name, consistent Organization markup and profiles linked through sameAs.
• Other sites mention you, especially the comparison articles, review sites and forums that AI answers already cite.

Measurement changes too. Search Console's Generative AI performance report, open to all sites since August 31, 2026, counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. For ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini you sample the answers to your buyers' questions yourself. Our post on GEO vs SEO explains what changes between ranking a page and being cited in an answer.

What GEO means in digital marketing, by context

Context settles it almost every time. Here is where the acronym turns up and the clue that tells you which one is meant.

The phrase that trips people up is "GEO SEO". Some agencies mean geo-targeted local SEO and others mean AI search. Ask which results they will report on. If the answer is Google Maps, it is local. If it is ChatGPT, it is the AI kind. If you are also sorting out AIO and AEO, our guide to the AI search acronyms covers the rest.

Which kind of GEO should you work on first?

Work on the one that matches how your customers find you. A business that sells within a short drive of its door gets more from local SEO and tight location targeting than from anything AI-specific. Fix the Business Profile, the location pages and the ad radius before you think about chatbots.

A business that sells online, or to buyers who research before they contact anyone, should start on AI-search GEO now. Software, agencies and B2B services fit here, because their buyers ask assistants for shortlists like "best payroll software for a 20-person company".

Plenty of businesses need both. A group of physiotherapy clinics runs a radius campaign for each clinic and also wants to be named when someone asks an AI assistant where to get a running injury treated. The work overlaps on the location pages. A crawlable page that states the address, the treatments and the prices helps the local result and gives an AI answer specific facts to repeat.

Check how AI engines read and describe your site

Our GEO tools cover the AI-search meaning, and each one runs on its own with its credit price shown before the run starts. AI Crawler View costs 8 credits and compares a page's raw HTML with the rendered page, listing the content, headings, prices and structured data that only appear after JavaScript runs. AI Answer Visibility costs 120 credits. It asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini one of your customers' questions with web search on and reports whether each answer names your brand, whether it cites your site and which brands it names instead. It does not cover Google AI Overviews.

Brand Narrative Check costs 150 credits. It asks the same three engines what your brand is and quotes any claims that may not match your home page. The Brand Entity Checker, the AI Bot Log Analyzer and the rest are on the GEO tools page.