My GEO for small business guide in Search Console: 215 impressions and an average position of 29.8

Google Search Console recorded 215 impressions, an average position of 29.8 and 0 clicks for the GEO for small business guide I published on 16 October 2026. That's the 28-day read from 12 November. These snapshots show search visibility for one guide. They don't establish how long GEO takes or whether AI engines recommend my business, and I haven't checked yet whether ChatGPT or any other AI engine names it.

GEO is the work of getting a business found and recommended by AI engines. I practise it on rayastats.com, which I run alone, with modest traffic.

Search Console numbers for the guide

I read Google Search Console for the guide three times in November. Each read covers 28 days, so the windows overlap.

1. 6 November (7 October to 3 November): 93 impressions, 0 clicks, average position 41.6.
2. 10 November (28 days to 8 November): 185 impressions, 0 clicks, average position 31.8.
3. 12 November (last 28 days): 215 impressions, 0 clicks, average position 29.8.

The guide's average position was 29.8 in the latest read. These figures don't establish why it received no clicks.

The first window starts on 7 October, nine days before the guide existed. Part of the rise from 93 to 185 is the later window covering more days the page was live.

The query reports cover the whole site, with no breakdown by page. They recorded 41 and then 85 impressions for "geo for small business", and 21 and then 52 for "geo for small businesses". The 12 November read lists 97 and 66, but it doesn't record which query filter was applied. These records don't establish each query's share of the guide's impressions.

Across the whole site, the 28 days read on 10 November show 447 impressions and 6 clicks. The 28 days before that show 39 impressions and 0 clicks. The guide accounts for none of those clicks.

Two long queries recorded average position 8

In the 10 November read, the site recorded an average position of 8 for two long questions: "what should a small business look for in a geo platform?" (4 impressions) and "how to check if ai search bots can crawl and parse text on decision-stage pages?" (9 impressions). The short head term "geo for small business" recorded an average position of 34.3 in the same read.

Those two queries totalled 13 impressions, too few to establish a ranking pattern.

What I did on the site

1. 16 October 2026: I published the GEO guide, about 2,200 words with a 10-step checklist.
2. 16 October 2026: I fixed a crawler problem I found while checking how crawlers see the site. English blog posts were also reachable under Bulgarian URLs and marked as Bulgarian, so search engines saw duplicate pages in the wrong language. Each post now has one address, and the other language redirects to it. Two posts also had two H1 headings, so their body headings became H2.
3. 19 October 2026: I published a second guide built on my own crawler data, Can AI engines read your website? I linked it from the GEO guide and added a Guides section to the site's llms.txt.

The GEO guide's HTML snapshot from 12 November contains one structured data graph, including the BlogPosting, BreadcrumbList, OnlineBusiness, Person and Service types. The business is described as an online business with no street address, because I work fully online.

I'm not claiming llms.txt or structured data moved any number in this post. The GEO guide itself says you don't need special files. I also can't tell you which of these changes, if any, moved impressions.

Crawlers were visiting before any of this

In the four weeks to 16 October 2026, my server logs showed 99 visits from OpenAI's search crawler (OAI-SearchBot), 62 from ClaudeBot (Anthropic's training crawler), 18 from PerplexityBot and 14 from Brave's crawler. Googlebot made 26 visits, verified against Google's published IP ranges. The AI crawler counts go by user agent only, so they're indicative.

Those logs show crawlers fetching pages. They don't show what any engine says about the site.

What hasn't happened yet

1. Clicks. The guide has 0 clicks from Google in every read. I'm not claiming a lead or a sale from it.
2. An AI engine check of rayastats.com. I haven't tested whether ChatGPT or any other AI engine names my site. It's the next thing I'll run, and I'll publish it.
3. Enough data. This is one small site and a few weeks of numbers, and Search Console impressions aren't visitors.

The check I'll run on my own business

The method is the same 10 questions on 3 days in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. I tested it on one anonymous med spa in Dallas that isn't a client, from 23 to 25 October 2026. Nobody commissioned the sample. ChatGPT named the business in 3, 1 and 4 of 8 general answers on the three days. Google's AI Overview named it in 1 of 8 each day and gave the wrong Saturday hours all three days.

A mention counts a name on the answer's map as well, and the 23 October ChatGPT count of 3 includes one map-only mention. One of the 8 general prompts left out Dallas and produced answers about Illinois in all three ChatGPT runs and in Google's first two runs. I kept it in the 8.

A single day of ChatGPT would have given me 3, 1 or 4, depending on the day. There's a separate post on how to check if ChatGPT names your local business.

What I'm doing next

These are plans. None of them is done.

1. A new title for the guide, aimed at the exact searches in the query reports, and more links to it from related posts.
2. A set of shorter posts around it, each built on one real check: wrong business facts in AI answers, the 3-day run, and what 50 med spa websites tell AI engines.
3. The same 3-day question method on my own business. I'll publish the numbers.

For local businesses in the US and UK

The AI Visibility Audit shows whether ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews name and recommend your business, with screenshots, repeated tests and a ranked fix list. Every prompt runs 3 times in each engine, on 3 different days, with your city written into every prompt. The Full Audit takes 3 business days and the Audit + Fix Kit takes 5, counted from the day after your intake answers arrive. Business days exclude weekends and bank holidays in England and Wales. Nobody can guarantee a place in an AI answer, and the audit doesn't promise one.

See what the AI Visibility Audit covers.