The Oil Change Test

A few weeks ago I asked AI where to get an oil change. I expected a list. What I got was a pick.

It named one independent shop on my side of the tracks. It told me what a recent customer actually paid, that the service took under fifteen minutes, that a chain down the road had quoted nearly double for the same thing, and that reviewers kept mentioning the same two details: nobody tried to upsell them, and the car came back washed.

Then I noticed where all of that came from. The price came from a customer. The comparison came from a customer. The pattern about upselling came from dozens of reviewers agreeing with each other. Almost nothing in the answer that won my business came from the business.

A client asked me that same week whether I design for GEO. The honest answer is sort of, and the half I can’t design is the half that decides it.

GEO is real, but it’s not what’s being sold

GEO stands for generative engine optimization: showing up when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google’s AI who they should hire. It’s a real discipline with real research behind it. The term comes from a peer-reviewed 2024 study by researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi, who tested nine tactics across ten thousand queries to see what actually earns a citation in an AI answer.

Here’s the finding that should make you raise an eyebrow at every “GEO plugin” on the market. The tactics that worked were the ones a careful writer already uses: citing credible sources, including real statistics, quoting people, writing clearly. Keyword stuffing, the backbone of every shortcut being sold right now, did nothing or actively hurt. The founding research of this entire field measured the shortcut and found it useless.

The half you can’t install

Go back to my oil change answer. That shop’s own website could claim honest pricing all day long, and the machine would shrug, because a business vouching for itself is marketing, and a crowd of strangers agreeing is evidence.

The data backs this up at scale. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that mentions across independent sources predict a brand’s visibility in AI answers three times better than backlinks do. Read that again if you’ve spent years chasing links. And ranking well on Google no longer covers you either. In July 2025, Ahrefs found that 76 percent of AI-cited pages also ranked in Google’s top ten. By March 2026, their updated analysis put that number at 38.

So here’s the whole game in two sentences.
Your site makes you legible.
Other people’s words make you the pick.

Where the work actually is

Your website still matters enormously, just for a more specific reason than before. Its job is legibility: who you are, who you serve, what you do, what your method is called, where you operate, stated plainly enough that a machine can repeat it without guessing. I’ve written before about letting your website carry the weight, and this is that same principle meeting a new reader. A legible site is what makes everything said about you elsewhere attach to the right name.

The other half you can’t install. It’s your Google reviews, the case study a client shares in their own words, the mention in a directory, the specific outcome someone describes to a colleague who writes it down somewhere public. That trail takes time and it takes work worth talking about, which is precisely why it’s trusted.

And here’s the part I keep coming back to. Getting picked is only the opening move. The machine seeds the promise. The business keeps it. If your reviews say you’re calm and clear and your process is smooth, the work has to be all three, every time, or the trail that made you the pick starts telling a different story.

Where you stand right now

Here’s a test you can run before your coffee goes cold. Open whichever AI you use and ask it the question your ideal client would actually ask. Make it about what you sell and where you sell it. If you’re a bookkeeper, that might be “who should handle the books for my small creative business?” If you run a physio clinic, it’s “where should I go for a running injury in my city?” Then read the answer twice. Once to see whether you’re in it, and once to notice who is, and what the machine chose to say about them.

If you’re absent, don’t read it as a verdict on your website. A well-built site handles the legibility half, and that half matters as much as it ever did. But no website, however good, can generate the internet’s opinion of you. That layer is made of other people’s words, and it’s new work for every business, because the machines only recently started answering questions like these. Which means the honest takeaway is better news than it first appears: most businesses have pieces of a trail, some reviews here, a directory listing there, but almost none of it was built with these answers in mind, because until recently there was no reason to. The race is new, and the businesses that start collecting their evidence deliberately, in the specific and corroborated shape the machines reward, are the ones with the head start.

If you want to know where you stand and which half to build first, that’s exactly where I start.

→ Let’s find out where you stand