What is GEO? Why your Costa Blanca business needs to care
Google, ChatGPT, and Bing now answer many searches with AI-generated summaries before anyone clicks a result. GEO is about making sure your business gets cited in those answers. Here's what it means for businesses on the Costa Blanca.
What is GEO? Why your Costa Blanca business needs to care
Search has changed.
Type "best real estate agent Costa Blanca" into Google and the first thing you might see isn't a list of links. It's a summary. A paragraph or 2, generated by AI, pulling from multiple sources, answering the question directly.
No click needed. The answer is just there.
That summary pulled from somewhere. The question is whether it pulled from your website.
What GEO actually is
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It's the practice of making sure your business and your content get cited by AI-generated search answers, not just ranked in traditional search results.
The platforms doing this: Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT with web search, Bing Copilot, Perplexity. All of them generate answers by pulling from sources they consider authoritative, structured, and relevant.
GEO builds on SEO. It doesn't replace it.
How AI decides what to cite
Research suggests that around 87% of ChatGPT citations match Bing's top organic search results. Google's AI Overviews pull heavily from pages that already rank well. Perplexity prioritises authoritative, well-structured sources.
The content that ranks well in traditional search tends to get cited in AI answers. The fundamentals are the same. The destinations have multiplied.
A strong local SEO foundation comes first. GEO builds on top of it.
What specifically helps you get cited
Clear, direct answers. AI systems look for content that answers questions directly. A paragraph that opens with "A good real estate agent on the Costa Blanca does X" is more likely to get cited than one that buries the answer after a long introduction.
Structured content. Headers, subheaders, short paragraphs, FAQ sections. AI can parse structured content more easily and extract specific answers from it. A wall of text gets skipped.
Schema markup. The technical signals that tell search engines exactly what your content is about. LocalBusiness schema, FAQ schema, Article schema. Most websites on the Costa Blanca don't have it. All of them benefit from adding it.
E-E-A-T signals. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. AI systems pull from sources that demonstrate genuine knowledge. A detailed, specific, experience-backed piece of content about real estate on the Costa Blanca gets cited more than a generic page that could have been written by anyone about anything.
Citations and backlinks. Being referenced by other authoritative sources tells AI systems you're worth citing. Local directories, business associations, news mentions, partner links: all of it builds the authority that gets you included.
What's different from traditional SEO
In traditional search, position 1 means someone clicks your link.
In AI search, being cited means you get mentioned in the summary. Sometimes with a link. Sometimes without. The client reads the answer, sees your business name, and decides whether to look further.
The goal shifts: cited as the source that answers the question. The more direct, specific, and authoritative your content is, the more likely AI systems are to treat it as the answer.
What this means for Costa Blanca businesses right now
Very few local businesses on the Costa Blanca are thinking about GEO yet. Most are still catching up on basic SEO.
That's an opportunity.
A business in Altea that builds a properly structured, authoritative website with clear answers to the questions expats and tourists actually search, in Dutch, English, and Spanish, is positioning itself as the source AI pulls from when those questions get asked.
The competition for that position is currently low. It won't stay that way.
Where to start
GEO and SEO share the same foundation. Do SEO properly, and you're building for both.
Make sure your website is fast, structured, and technically clean. Write content that answers real questions with specific, experience-backed detail. Add schema markup. Build local citations. Get your Google Business Profile fully in order.
The businesses that show up in AI answers in 2 years are the ones building authority now.
Send me your URL on WhatsApp and I'll tell you where your site currently stands on all of this.
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