What is the difference between AI visibility and local SEO?

Local SEO is about ranking in Google's map pack and local results — driven by your Google Business Profile, proximity, reviews and local links. AI visibility is about whether an assistant names your business in a conversational answer, which draws on a broader, more trust-weighted picture: a crawlable site, a resolvable entity, answer-ready content and consistent corroboration across the sources a model reads. They overlap heavily — clean local data helps both — but ranking well on Google Maps does not guarantee an assistant will recommend you, because the assistant is synthesizing an answer rather than ordering a list.

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FAQ

If I rank well in local SEO, am I already visible to AI?Partly, because the clean, consistent local data that helps your map ranking also helps a model trust you. But AI answers weight crawlable on-site content, entity clarity and corroboration across many sources more heavily than proximity, so a strong map ranking is a good start, not a guarantee that an assistant will name you.

Should I stop doing local SEO and focus only on AI visibility?No. The two reinforce each other, and the groundwork — an accurate Google Business Profile, consistent citations and genuine reviews — feeds both. The addition for AI visibility is making your site crawlable and answer-ready and your entity clear, so the smart move is to keep local SEO and layer the AI-specific work on top.

How do I find out where I stand?Run a free Cited scan — it checks the AI-search readiness signals on your website (crawler access, llms.txt, structured data and answer-ready content) and lists the fixes to make first.

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