What is local GEO? A plain guide to local AI search optimization
Local GEO is the work of getting named by AI assistants when someone asks for a business in a specific place. What it covers, how it differs from national GEO, and what to measure.
Ask ChatGPT for "a good accountant for a small business" and the answer depends partly on where it thinks you are. Put a city in the question and you'll often get a different list. Local GEO is the work of getting your business into that second kind of answer: the one an AI assistant gives to someone who wants a provider in a particular town or neighbourhood.
GEO stands for generative engine optimization. The national version asks whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews mention your brand when people ask about your category. The local version asks the same thing for a place. For a software company that sells everywhere, place rarely matters. For a dentist, a roofer, a law firm with six offices or a retailer with forty stores, place is most of the question.
How local GEO differs from national GEO
The unit of measurement changes first. National GEO reports one visibility number per engine. Local GEO needs one per location, because a brand can be named every day in one city and never in the next. Average those two and you get a number that describes neither market. We covered how to pick the cities that deserve their own tracking in how many cities to track in AI search.
The competition changes as well. Nationally you're up against the brands that publish the most-cited guides in your category. Locally you're often up against the business down the road, a regional directory or a local forum thread, and those sources never appear in a national prompt set.
Then there are the questions. Local buyers ask with a place in mind: "best physiotherapist in [city]", "who can fix a boiler today near me", "a vegan bakery open late around here". Some name the city. Many don't, and the engine fills in a location from whatever it knows about the person asking. Good tracking covers both kinds.
What to measure
Four measurements make up a working local GEO program. You don't need all four on day one, but you'll want them before you start changing pages.
Location-set prompts
Pick 15 to 30 questions a real customer would ask, then run the exact same wording in each location you care about, with the location set in the tool rather than typed into the question. That gives you a clean comparison: same question, different place. Add a few prompts that name the city outright, since people type those too. The details of writing them are in how to write local prompts for AI visibility tracking.
Citations per location
When an engine names a competitor instead of you, the citations show what the answer was built from. In local answers that is often a directory listing, a review site, a news story or a competitor's location page. Each citation that isn't yours is a lead. Either it's a page you could get listed on, or it covers something your own location page doesn't.
Crawler access to location pages
An engine can't cite a page it never fetched. Check whether AI crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot actually request your city and branch pages, and whether those requests succeed. One bot-protection rule at the CDN can remove you from answers in every location at once, and nothing on the page itself will tell you.
Google works differently. Its AI features documentation says a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, with no extra technical requirements. So for Google, plain indexing in Search Console is the check.
AI-referred visits and conversions
Visibility only matters if it sends people. Track the visits that arrive from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and the rest, which landing pages they hit, and whether those visitors convert. For a multi-location business the landing page usually tells you which branch the visitor wanted, which turns a vague "AI traffic is up" into a per-location number.
What local GEO is not
It isn't map-pack rank tracking. A map pack is a ranked list of pins. An AI answer is a paragraph that might name three businesses, cite five sources and change tomorrow. It also doesn't replace local SEO: accurate listings and decent location pages still feed the sources AI engines read. We compare the two in local GEO vs local SEO.
Nobody outside OpenAI or Google knows exactly how their assistants choose local businesses. A published list of "local AI ranking factors" is somebody's guess. What you can do is observe. Run the same questions in each place, see who gets named, read what they cite, then change your pages and check whether the result moves.
Where Promptwatch fits
Promptwatch is the tool we'd use to run all four measurements in one workspace. Each monitor carries a location (a country, plus an optional state and city), a language, an optional persona and the models to query, and it runs its prompt panel daily on each model. A ten-location business builds ten monitors with the same prompts and reads them side by side.
The rest of the loop lives next to the monitors. Citation analytics shows the pages and domains each answer cited, with separate Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn reports and offsite mentions of your brand on pages that don't link to you. Agent Analytics logs AI crawler visits, IP-verified so spoofed user agents are filtered out, with error explanations and a citation rate per page. Visitor analytics attributes AI-referred traffic and conversions through a small script, a GTM template or the WordPress plugin.
The plan matters more for local work than for national tracking. Country-level tracking is on every paid brand plan, from Essential at $95/mo, but Essential has no crawler logs; those start on Professional at $245/mo. State and city tracking start on Business at $579/mo, which has no free trial, and are on every agency plan from Kick-off at $199/mo. Business also includes local GEO/SEO coordinate targeting, added in October 2026. It pins a monitor to an exact spot with a radius between 20 m and 5 km, so ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode answer as if asked from there, while other models fall back to the country, state and city. Coordinate targeting is also on Agency Scale ($799/mo) and Enterprise.
If you have one location and mainly want to know whether AI names you at all, Essential's country tracking is a fair place to start. Once the answer changes from town to town, you need city monitors, and that means Business or an agency plan. Plans and the trial terms are on promptwatch.com.