Getting started
Is GEO worth it for a small business in Bangalore?
Often more than for a big brand. Local prompts are specific — “dentist near HSR Layout” — engines prefer verifiable local entities, and the competition is thin on technical quality. A clinic or studio with consistent profiles, reviews and clear answer-first pages can be named ahead of a national chain for its own area, usually within 4–8 weeks.
Updated · Citemark
Where small businesses win
Area-level and service-level prompts. An engine answering “physiotherapy near Indiranagar” wants a verified business in Indiranagar with clear services, hours and reviews — not a national brand’s city page. Google lists relevance, distance and prominence as the local ranking factors, and AI Overviews build on them.
Where they don’t
National category prompts (“best hospital in India”) and prompts dominated by portals. Those take mentions at a scale a small business shouldn’t pay for. A good audit says so and points the budget at the prompts you can actually win.
The minimum that works
A Google Business Profile and Bing Places that match the site exactly; one answer-first page per service with the area named; a review process the front desk can run; llms.txt and clean schema; and ten prompts checked monthly. That is the Launch plan, and most of it is set up in the first month.
Sources
See what AI says about you right now
The free audit runs the prompts for your category across every engine and shows, screenshot by screenshot, who gets cited — and the three things to fix first.