Talloo

Every agency email this month says the same thing: "AI search is replacing Google. Forget SEO, go all-in on GEO." We manage local visibility across hundreds of businesses. That framing is costing people real rankings. GEO is not a replacement for local SEO. It's an extension of it. The same signals that push you up in Google Maps are the exact inputs AI engines use to decide which businesses to cite: >> Citation consistency across directories >> Google Business Profile health >> Review volume, recency, and response patterns >> Structured, crawlable information about who you are and where you operate When ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews pick a local business to recommend, they're not pulling from some separate "AI index." They're leaning on the same credibility signals Maps has used for years, plus a few new ones layered on top. So when a business owner is told to pivot the budget away from foundational SEO toward AI-only tactics, both channels weaken at the same time. Maps rankings slip. AI citations never materialize because the underlying signals were never there to begin with. The businesses winning in AI answers right now are the ones that kept doing the boring local SEO work, and added GEO on top. Same foundation. New surface. Not a swap.

Thank you Scott Marker for the opportunity to visit with you on your podcast. We truly enjoyed the time and the opportunity to share our thoughts on digital visibility. https://lnkd.in/g2yW_fsk

AI engines cross-reference your business across 70+ directories before deciding whether to recommend you. A dropped suite number. An old phone line. A review from 2023 sitting at the top of your profile. Each one is a signal. And most local businesses are sending the wrong ones without knowing it. We broke down the five signals AI platforms weigh before surfacing a business in a direct answer, from citation consistency to review recency to the structural data most sites never publish. Swipe through. If your business is invisible in AI search right now, one of these five is almost certainly why.

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Talloo’s Mid-Year Visibility Report just dropped. The way customers discover, evaluate, and choose local businesses has changed more in the last three years than in the previous fifteen. AI went mainstream. Verification habits shifted. Consistency became the new ranking factor. And most businesses are still operating on outdated playbooks. This report breaks it all down with fresh 2026 data from BrightLocal, Yext, Google, Apple, and more: — 45% of consumers now use AI to find local businesses (up from 6% in 2025) — 71% of local journeys still touch Google — 88% verify AI recommendations before acting Why infrastructure beats campaigns in 2026 If you own or advise a local/home service business, this is essential reading. Read The State of Local Visibility: Link in Comments What’s one shift you’ve noticed in your market this year? Drop it in the comments, I’d love to hear your take. #LocalSEO #GoogleBusinessProfile #SmallBusinessMarketing #AI #DigitalMarketing

UNLOCK LOCAL BUSINESS VISIBILITY In just 30 seconds, potential customers decide which local business to trust. If you aren’t winning that window, you’re losing them to a competitor. Stop relying on generic marketing hacks. It’s time for a systematic, evergreen strategy for local dominance. Join Talloo for this high-impact session where you’ll learn: — The 5 Critical Surfaces: Where customers evaluate you right now (maps, search, reviews, and AI). — The Two Audiences: Why you have two audiences, and why only one of them is human. — The 3 Authority Signals: How Presence, Proof, and Activity decide who gets chosen. — The AI Shift: How AI assistants are changing the way customers ask, "Who should I call?" Event Details: Date & Time: Monday, July 27, 2026 | 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM MDT Location: 5777 N Meeker Ave, Boise, ID 83713 Capacity: Limited With limited seats available, this event will fill quickly. Influence the 30-second buying decision before they ever click. https://lnkd.in/gYHiyJ4D

I pulled up a client's business in ChatGPT last week. It wasn't there. Their competitor was. Ranked, described, and recommended in a clean three-sentence answer to a query my client should have owned. This is the shift most local businesses haven't caught up to yet. Google AI Overviews now appear on the majority of commercial searches. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are answering "best plumber near me" and "who does knee surgery in [city]" questions every single day. The old playbook was: rank on page one and hope someone clicks. The new reality is: if the AI doesn't mention you in its answer, most people never scroll far enough to find you. The answer IS the search result now. What determines whether an AI includes your business in its response is different from what got you ranked on Google a few years ago. Structured data, consistent listings across the surfaces AI models pull from, review signals, and how your business is described across the open web all feed into it. Most of the businesses we audit are invisible on at least two of the four major AI platforms. Not because they're doing anything wrong. Because nobody told them the game changed. If you haven't checked how your business shows up in AI answers lately, that's the exercise for this week. Type your top three service queries into ChatGPT and Perplexity. See what comes back. Then decide what to do about it.

You claimed your business profile once. The directories didn't get the memo. Data drift is what happens next. You update your hours on Google. Yelp still shows the old ones. You move locations. Forty directories keep serving the old address from cache. Nobody made a mistake. Directories just don't sync themselves. Here's why it matters now: AI assistants cross-reference your business across dozens of sources before recommending you. When your phone number on one site doesn't match another, that inconsistency becomes a signal. And it's the wrong kind of signal. AI systems treat mismatched data as a credibility gap and deprioritize your business as a reliable answer. Claiming a profile and managing a profile are two different jobs. A listing you set up in 2021 is not the same as a listing that's accurate today. Visibility improves through ongoing management, not one-time setup. That's the work Talloo does in the background so your name, address, phone, and hours stay consistent across the surfaces customers and AI actually check.

A business owner spends an afternoon claiming their Google profile, updates their hours, and considers the job done. Eighteen months later, three directories still show the old address and the phone number on Apple Maps is wrong. We see this pattern every week. Claiming a profile is a setup event. Managing it is ongoing work. Those are two different jobs, and most local businesses only do the first one. Here is what actually happens after setup. Hours shift for the season. A phone number gets ported. An address changes when the shop moves across town. Each update lands on one platform, maybe two. The other twenty directories keep broadcasting the old data. None of these platforms sync each other. Google Business Profile does not talk to Apple Maps. Yelp does not talk to Bing Places. Data aggregators feed dozens of smaller directories that no one ever logs into again. AI assistants read all of it at once. When they see three phone numbers and two addresses for the same business, they treat the business as unreliable and quietly deprioritize it in answers. Citation consistency is a trust signal, and inconsistent citations send the wrong one. The businesses that stay visible treat their profiles as infrastructure, not a checklist. Data gets audited. Drift gets corrected. New directories get monitored as they emerge. If your business has moved, changed hours, or updated a phone number even once, there is a strong chance your information is conflicting across sources right now. Talloo manages that maintenance phase for you, so the signals stay consistent and the AI systems keep recommending you.

Your website traffic isn't what you think it is Most business owners look at their website traffic and see customers. Most of it isn't. Here's a real example. This is the "top pages" report for a website. The second, third, and fourth most visited pages are /wp-login.php, /wp-admin/index.php, and /wp-admin/edit.php. There's one problem. This site doesn't run on WordPress. Those pages don't exist. So who is visiting them? Automated bots. They crawl the internet looking for WordPress sites to break into, and they knock on those same doors on every site they find. The visits are real. The visitors are not. This happens to every website. It is normal. But it lands in your analytics right next to your real traffic, and it makes your numbers look bigger than they are. That matters for one reason. You cannot make good decisions from a number that is mostly noise. And there is a deeper issue. Even your real visits are the end of the story, not the start. By the time someone loads your website, they have already decided to consider you. That decision happened somewhere else. On a map. In search results. In your reviews. In an answer from an AI assistant. Those are the surfaces where customers choose. Your website mostly confirms a choice they already leaned toward. So here is the takeaway. Stop measuring visits. Start measuring whether the right customers can find you, trust you, and reach you in the places where they actually decide. That is the number that turns into calls and jobs.