At the start of this month, Google’s own AI answer described me as a florist.
Which I was, for a very long time, and I loved it. But it’s been several years since the business changed direction, and it showed me something really clearly. SEO and GEO are how people find you on Google and on AI tools like ChatGPT, and both come down to the same thing: being known for one clear thing, said the same way everywhere.
How I got here
For years our SEO was really strong, and I’d love to say that was down to us being very clever, but it wasn’t. We had an agency looking after it, and alongside that the floristry business had a huge amount of editorial coverage online, on websites like Vogue, House and Garden, The New York Times and The Sunday Times Style, especially around the royal wedding. All of it pointed back to us, and Google loved it.
The agency did the best job they could with what they were asked to do, and the reason I never understood it was much more about me than about them. It felt like a technical corner of the business that belonged to somebody else. But almost everything the internet knew about me was still linked to the old business, so this month I decided to understand it properly myself.
What SEO and GEO actually are
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It’s simply making sure that when somebody types a question into Google, and you’re the right answer to it, your website comes up. That’s really all it is.
GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. It’s exactly the same idea, but for AI tools… ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and the AI answer that now sits at the top of so many Google searches. More and more people ask these tools for recommendations, and the tools answer with real names.
Why this is such good news for small businesses
For years, getting to the top of Google was incredibly hard for small, independent businesses. People rarely click beyond the first few results, and those spots almost always went to the big companies, with big budgets, whole teams working on it, and years of history behind them.
AI has completely levelled the playing field. When you ask an AI tool for a recommendation, it doesn’t run just one search. It runs lots of its own searches in the background, often five or ten versions of the same question, reads a great many pages, and recommends the people it sees described most clearly and most consistently across all of them.
So you no longer need to win that one top spot. You could be further down on lots of different websites (a podcast page, a directory, an article you’ve been featured in, your own website) and still be the name the AI tool comes back with, because it keeps seeing you, described in the same clear way, again and again. None of that needs a big team or a huge budget.
Why being known for one thing matters
This is the part I love most, because it’s the thing I talk about more than anything.
When you deeply understand what you do so uniquely, and what the right people really want and need, and you bring those two together, you have the one thing that only you do in quite that way. It’s what lets you introduce yourself clearly at a dinner, makes your website clear the moment somebody lands on it, makes it easy for other people to refer you, and shapes your marketing and your pricing.
And it turns out search engines and AI tools want exactly the same thing. If your message is spread across lots of different things, or described differently on your website and your Instagram and somewhere else again, they can’t quite piece together what you do. Somebody else in your field will come up instead, even when your work is every bit as good as theirs, or better, simply because their message is clearer.
What I’m doing now
I’ve built a skill inside Claude (a saved set of instructions it follows the same way every time) and a dashboard that guides me step by step. It reads the business first, asks the AI tools the questions a potential client might ask, finds every place my facts don’t agree, helps me build one page that answers the question clearly, finds the places the AI tools already trust, makes my description identical everywhere, and checks again on the last day of every month.
It’s felt like a really big spring clean in the back of the business, and rather than feeling overwhelmed, I feel completely in control of it. It’s also why the journal is changing a little: a clear question, a clear answer near the top, then the detail, because people and search engines take in information in very similar ways.
A first step, if you’re curious
Ask ChatGPT, or whichever AI tool you use, the question one of your ideal clients or customers might ask, and see who it names. Then search your own name, and read your website, your Instagram bio and your LinkedIn side by side. Most of us find they each say something slightly different, and simply seeing that clearly is where it all starts.
All of this only feels simple because of the work that comes before it: knowing exactly what you’re brilliant at, who you’re for, and how to say it in a way that’s unmistakably yours. That’s the work at the heart of The Bright Line.
Being known for one clear thing has always mattered. Now it’s how people find you, too.
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