Generative engine optimization for contractors, without the schema snake oil

GEO is plain to define. It is the work of making your business the answer AI engines give. When a homeowner asks ChatGPT or Perplexity who to call, the engine cites a handful of pages. GEO earns your pages that spot.

The shift is measurable, not hype. AI Overviews appeared on 56% of the 298 trade-marketing search results we measured in August 2026 (our measurement; the exact query list and method are available on request). More than half the doors your buyers walk through now have an AI answer in front of them.

No. Google's changelog says FAQ rich results “will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026”. How-to rich results went first — removed from desktop and mobile in September 2023.

Keep the visible FAQ content — people and AI engines read the answers. What is dead is the markup invoice. If an agency quote still carries an “FAQ schema” or “AI schema” line item, the thing being billed no longer exists. We keep the receipts on our practices we refuse to bill for page.

Google says it plainly: “You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add.”

What works is structure and proof. An answer in the first two sentences of the page. Facts that link their primary sources. A named author with a real page. Visible published and updated dates. A robots policy that lets AI crawlers in. That is the deliverable list, and every piece of it is on this site for you to inspect.

Honestly, or not at all. Each month we run a fixed list of prompts through the engines your buyers use — and record which businesses get cited, by name, with dates. Your report lists the exact prompts, the engines, and the dates. You can re-run every check yourself. There is no proprietary “AI score.”

Want the do-it-yourself version first? Read get cited in AI Overviews and the AI visibility playbook.

GEO ships as part of our SEO retainers, not as a bolt-on. The structural work — answer-first pages, sourced facts, author entity, dates — lands in the first month. Citations follow on the engines' own schedule, and nobody honest controls that schedule. A measured competitor sells a “90-day AI citation guarantee.” Ask them what happens on day 91.

FAQ schema. How-to schema. “AI Overview schema.” Star-rating markup about your own business — Google has long ruled that self-serving reviews are ineligible for stars. The full refusal list, with Google's own notices linked and dated, lives at what we won't sell you.