4 months ago, I started working on a USA-based local service business in New York.

The goal wasn’t simply to increase rankings. The bigger goal was to build a stronger local search presence, service-page visibility, brand authority, and visibility across Google’s evolving AI-driven search experience.

At that time, the business had a Google Business Profile, but it wasn’t getting the visibility it deserved.

For example, the GBP was sitting around position #17 for its target local search. Today, it’s around position #4.

The focus was on understanding the business, its services, its local market, the search intent behind each service, and how Google could better understand the relationship between the business, services, location, and brand.

At the same time, I worked on the website’s service pages.

Instead of treating the website as one general local business website, I worked on strengthening individual service pages around their specific search intent and local relevance.

And the result has been quite interesting. Today, around 80% of the website’s service pages are ranking on Google’s first page. The organic traffic has also grown significantly.

According to Google Search Console, the latest 3 months generated:

6.56K clicks compared with 909 clicks in the previous 3 months. That’s roughly 7.2× growth in organic clicks. Impressions also increased from around 413K to 2.47M. And average position improved from 11.8 to 8.6.

But honestly, the traffic growth isn’t even the part I’m most excited about. There’s another change that caught my attention.

Google’s AI search visibility.

Before I started working on this website, its pages were not receiving citations in Google’s AI Overviews.

Now, the website is getting approximately 4K–8K AI Overview citations per day. And this is exactly why I think Local SEO is becoming much bigger than simply ranking in the local pack.

Today, I’m not only thinking about:

How do I get this business to rank for this keyword?

I’m also thinking about:

– How does Google understand this business?

– How clearly does it understand the services?

– Does the content actually answer the questions users are asking?

– Can the website become a useful source for Google’s answer systems?

– Can the brand build enough relevance and entity-level understanding to appear across different search experiences?

That’s where my work has increasingly moved toward AEO and GEO alongside traditional Local SEO.

For this project, the strategy has been a combination of GBP management, local search optimization, service-page SEO, search-intent optimization, content structure, brand/entity signals, AEO, GEO, and AI-search visibility.

I don’t see these as completely separate things.

A strong local business presence should connect all of them.

– The Google Business Profile helps Google understand the local business.

– The service pages help Google understand what the business actually offers.

– The content helps answer the questions people are searching for.

– The brand and entity signals help establish context around the business.

And together, these can create visibility across traditional organic search as well as newer AI-driven search experiences.

That’s the part of SEO I find most interesting right now.

We’re moving from a world where the goal was simply:

“Rank #1 on Google.”

to a much broader search environment where businesses need to be understood, discovered, surfaced, and cited.

Four months into this project, seeing the GBP move from #17 to #4, around 80% of service pages reach Google’s first page, organic clicks growing by roughly 7×, and the website going from zero AI Overview citations to thousands of citations every day has been a really valuable experience.

Hi, This is Tanvir Hushan, An Advanced AI SEO Strategist, AEO/GEO Expert, and a Top-Rated freelancer.