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From Clicks to Conversations: Why Your Business Must Be Ready for AI Search

  • Author: Dan Smyth. Founder Olympus Lab.

    How people find and choose businesses online is shifting fast. AI chatbots are becoming the first place many consumers go for recommendations. From “best accountant in Belfast” to “what's the best TV for less than £250?”. Recent data shows AI‑related search traffic growing by more than 500% year over year, as users move from search engines to assistants.​ Gartner projects that by 2028, organic search traffic to websites will be down 50% or more as consumers fully embrace generative AI search.

    Instead of scrolling through pages of blue links on Google, people increasingly have a conversation with platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity and ask them who they should trust. It’s “convo” rather than “click‑through”, and in that model only a handful of brands get named at all.

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    What is GEO?

    Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is about making sure your brand is one of the names AI answers recommend.

    Traditional SEO optimises pages so they rank higher in search results. GEO goes a step further, it gives large language models (LLMs) enough clear, consistent evidence that they can confidently conclude that your business is the one to recommend.​

    Put simply, an LLM wants to be sure you’re a good choice. Good GEO work:

    • Ensures that evidence exists across your site and trusted third‑party sources.
    • Structures that evidence so AI systems can read and understand it quickly.

    Quick wins businesses can take today

    One of the first things we check is whether a company is accidentally blocking AI crawler bots.

    Just as Google uses crawlers to read and index the web, LLMs rely on their own crawlers and partner data sources to understand who you are and what you do. If your site is blocking those bots in Robots.txt or via security tools, models may never properly see your content and they can’t recommend a business they don’t know exists.

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    Where we fit in

    Olympus Lab is designed to be your GEO analyst and consultant in one simple tool.

    Each month it:

    • Tracks the real prompts your potential customers are asking AI tools about your space.
    • Checks how often and how prominently your brand appears in those responses.
    • Generates a focused 10‑task action plan with the highest‑impact changes you can make to improve that visibility. Schema fixes, content upgrades and citation targets.

    Instead of another complex dashboard, you get a clear, actionable GEO plan in your inbox every month so when someone in your market asks AI who to go with, your name is in the answer.

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