Podcast Shownotes:
Christian Hustle explains that when ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI search platforms don’t mention a business, it’s usually due to data footprint gaps rather than bias or bad luck, and multi-location brands often struggle despite strong SEO.
He contrasts SEO (ranking links) with GEO/LLM optimization (structured data and influencing AI-generated answers), noting a business can rank #1 on Google yet still not qualify in AI responses because AI evaluates the broader ecosystem: website, Google Business Profile, reviews and sentiment, citations, directories, structured data, and media coverage.
Common issues include inconsistent positioning, categories, services, and reviews across locations, thin or non-conversational content that doesn’t answer customer questions, limited external authority mentions, and poor review freshness/velocity.
He recommends testing visibility with “best X in my city” prompts, comparing competitors’ reviews, categories, content depth/format, and external mentions, and fixing discrepancies.
00:00 Why AI Ignores You
00:30 SEO vs GEO vs AI
01:10 Data Footprint Gaps
02:38 Fixing Content Signals
03:42 Mentions Beat Backlinks
04:39 Review Freshness Matters
06:08 Visibility Test Checklist
07:57 Download and Next Steps
08:34 Wrap Up and Subscribe
Podcast Transcript:
Christian: Chat, GPT isn’t mentioning your business. It’s not random, it’s not bias, it’s not bad luck. It’s usually a data footprint problem and many multi-location businesses with strong SEO still fail here. Hey, welcome to the Default Answer Show. I’m Christian Hustle, and in this episode we’re talking about why location based businesses lose visibility in chat, GPT Gemini, and all the other AI search platforms, even with strong SEO.
So let’s start by comparing SEO versus GEO versus ai, SEO, versus whatever the name out there they’re calling it.
In simple terms, SEO is all about ranking and search results. GEO is optimizing your structured data for machine extraction, LLM eo. It’s influencing AI generator responses. But the important part is that you, you can be ranking number one on Google and still not qualify in AI answers, and you probably are asking yourself why.
[00:01:00] Well, that is because search engines return links. While AI systems return answers,
obviously they both have a different objective and a different user experience.
So what are data footprint gaps? Because this is going to be the core of this episode, and to understand this further, we need to really understand what are these gaps and where do they come from? Well, these gaps come from everything AI can see about your business across website, Google Business profile.
Reviews and sentiment, citations, all those things mentions about your brand directories, structured data on your website and media coverage on other publications. So, yeah, AI doesn’t just read your homepage. It reads your entire ecosystem. AI doesn’t just read what’s on your website.
It reads what’s out there across the entire internet about your business.
So then these data footprint gaps then become weak consensus signals. Specifically if your positioning varies across your locations spec, [00:02:00] you know, for multi-locations, some locations focuses on one thing, the other ones are doing something else. Reviews are inconsistent across your locations.
Categories don’t align even though they are the exact same company doing the exact same thing. And then the one that I see the most often, services aren’t clearly reinforced and aligned across your locations. And all these just creates hesitation for AI because AI rewards reinforcement, not randomness across your locations, even though they are the same brand,
I am still seeing inconsistencies when it comes to multi-location brands.
And when I say inconsistency, it doesn’t mean you’re not optimizing all of them. It just means there’s, there’s some missing information, missing conversational content that could be better aligned so that AI systems can respond to questions And these gaps can be addressed by covering conversational content. You know, aligning your, signals may be a lack of strategy on how to provide ai. With [00:03:00] enough information to respond to questions, to provide AI with clear answers, give them an FAQ style content on service pages or on your product pages, and being very strategic on how you word this.
You want it to be conversational phrasing so that AI can extract that and then go quote you and recommend you to the user. But if your site is thin you are listing your services without an explanation, then AI is going to struggle to extract all the information and data that it needs.
If your website is currently not clearly answering any of these questions that customers are asking, AI cannot quote you because it doesn’t know the answer since you don’t have it anywhere in your ecosystem.
Speaking about ecosystem, the lack of authority mentions back in the day, back in the SEO days, we used to call it link building, right? Where other publications link to your website. Well, the link, you know, remove the link from this equation. What we want to focus on is that AI confidence increases when your business is mentioned [00:04:00] externally on publications, uh, industry associations you do business with. Local media mentions, you know, like the, the best in my city, the best 10 restaurants in this city, or the best 10 attorneys in Dallas. They want those high authority domains to list you.
Links are no longer relevant that it used to, but dimension is, this is far beyond as EO backlinks. This is more pr, right? It’s all about entity. Reinforcement authority in AI isn’t about the link juice, as we used to call it. I love that word. It’s about correlation. It’s about, Hey, ai, this is what I say about me.
This is what customers talk about me, and this is what the media thinks and says about me. Which brings me to another issue that I see a lot, which is poor review, freshness, and this is one that is underrated, and I’ve made many videos about this in the past. You can go to the channel and check ’em out, But review velocity is one of them. How often are you getting reviews? This velocity, this freshness on reviews and sentiment is a key signal [00:05:00] to AI systems.
Simply because AI confidence drops when your reviews are old. Your velocity is inconsistent. You’re not getting reviews for for weeks or months at a time. And when you do, the sentiment completely shifts from, you know, a very loved brand. Now, people complaining ’cause obviously it’s easier to get complaints and reviews than to get five stars for Perfect service.
But the bottom line is that fresh review signals but the reality is that fresh reviews signal active relevance to ai, and I know this is a challenge, right? Multi-location businesses often struggle with review consistency specifically. You know, when you have a hundred or 500 locations, it gets more complex.
and I get it. Trust me, I know how difficult this is to maintain consistency, to, you know, try not to be too pushy asking for those reviews, but you still wanna collect those. I mean, we own three nail salons. Aside from all the clients that we manage here at the agency, and this is a consistent challenge on almost every call, is how do we keep consistency, how [00:06:00] to maintain that velocity.
Lemme know in the comments if you want me to drop another video to talk about tactics and you know, what, what to do and what not to do. But let’s turn this into more, what do you do from with this information, with this understanding of AI systems and where do you start? well, we usually start by testing your visibility.
So you can do this right now after this video. Hopefully you stay here until we we’re done. But go through a checklist. You know, go on on Gemini, go on chat, g, pt, uh, if you’re in B2B, go to clot or perplexity.
Go in there and prompt. Best X, best service in my city and see if you’re mentioned. Whether you are or you’re not. Compare the businesses that appear. Look at the review volume. Look at how frequent are they getting reviews? Look at their category. Clarity is their category clear on business profile versus directories versus their website?
And then while you’re on the website, analyze how depth is their [00:07:00] content? Is it thin or is it very explanatory with a lot of information, A lot of details in there about their products and services.
While you are at their website, you, you also wanna look at the. Structure formatting. Do they have a main title with subtitles that corroborate the the top idea? Do they have wall structure paragraphs?
Do their pages, answer a lot of the questions that customers are asking, and then go compare their external mentions? You can literally just go on Google and Google the company name and see what publications are mentioning this brand or this business, and do that for yourself as well.
You wanna see if other bloggers or publications or media channels are talking about you. Are they including you on best of list? Are they giving you a review in a, you know, in a blog, or maybe it’s a resource page, just talking about the city overall and giving recommendations to your business. But if you’re seeing that a competitor has all these different mentions and you don’t, that’s where I would start.
Now, this is just a very quick, basic [00:08:00] checklist. If you want a full breakdown checklist, I’m gonna drop a link in the description box. You could go download that. This is a great way to start, is definitely there’s a lot more things to analyze, but it’s a great way to start and chances are you’re going to be able to find issues and discrepancies in this starter checklist, and then worry about the more advanced stuff later.
But if you fix these things. I can guarantee you’re gonna start seeing some results. You’re gonna start seeing your more inclusion in prompts. You’re gonna see AI recommending your brand better, and you’re gonna find a lot of discrepancies that you wanna fix ASAP. Right.
Well I hope you found this video useful. Smash the subscribe button as we have a lot of videos coming in this topic.
But thank you so much for tuning in today. I’ll catch you on the next one. Keep hustling.
