For more than a decade, local visibility followed a familiar playbook: optimize listings, manage reviews, publish local content, and climb the rankings. That playbook is breaking down. As AI-driven search and answer engines increasingly decide which businesses get surfaced—and which get ignored—brands are discovering an uncomfortable truth: they’re optimized for keywords, not for AI.

Uberall is stepping directly into that gap.

The location marketing platform has launched GEO Studio, which it describes as the industry’s first Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) solution. Built in partnership with AthenaHQ, the platform is designed to help multi-location brands remain visible, accurate, and recommended as AI systems replace traditional search results with synthesized answers.

The timing is deliberate. As AI agents filter choices based on confidence, completeness, and consistency—not just relevance—many brands are finding themselves invisible in the very systems consumers now trust most.

The AI visibility problem no one planned for

Uberall frames GEO Studio as a response to what it calls the biggest visibility crisis brands have faced in a decade. According to the company, roughly 68% of local businesses appear incorrectly in AI-generated results due to missing, outdated, or inconsistent data.

That matters because AI doesn’t just retrieve information—it judges it. When AI systems generate answers about nearby services, they weigh trust signals, data consistency, and contextual clarity. If a brand’s location data is fragmented across platforms, AI confidence drops—and so does visibility.

Traditional SEO tactics don’t solve this problem. Keywords, backlinks, and long-form content are increasingly secondary when AI agents summarize, compare, and recommend businesses without ever showing a list of links.

In that environment, “AI-ready” has become a new baseline requirement.

What GEO Studio actually does

Uberall’s pitch is straightforward: GEO Studio makes every location “AI-eligible.” Instead of treating AI visibility as an abstract concept, the platform operationalizes it through three core capabilities.

First, GEO Studio monitors AI visibility itself. Brands can see exactly how AI systems describe them, whether that information is accurate, and how they compare to competitors—at both the brand and individual location level. This is a notable shift from traditional rank tracking, which measures placement rather than perception.

Second, the platform includes a generative content engine built specifically for AI readability. Rather than producing generic blog posts, GEO Studio generates structured, locally relevant content that AI systems can easily interpret: FAQs, location pages, social posts, review responses, snippets, and more. The emphasis is on clarity and structure, not volume.

Third, GEO Studio automates distribution across the places AI looks for signals. That includes Google Business Profiles, local landing pages, social channels, blogs, and third-party directories. The goal is consistency at scale—one of the hardest problems for multi-location brands to solve manually.

Taken together, these capabilities turn AI optimization into a repeatable workflow rather than a guessing game.

Why this is different from “AI SEO”

The distinction Uberall is drawing between SEO and GEO is more than semantic.

SEO is built around search engines indexing pages and ranking results. GEO assumes that AI systems act more like decision engines, synthesizing information from multiple sources and making recommendations based on confidence signals.

In that model, being “correct” matters as much as being “relevant.” A business with perfect keyword optimization but inconsistent hours, mismatched addresses, or thin local context may lose out to a competitor with cleaner, more structured data—even if that competitor has weaker traditional SEO.

Uberall’s advantage is its heritage. The company already manages location data, listings, reviews, and local pages for enterprise brands. GEO Studio extends that foundation into the AI era, rather than bolting AI optimization onto a content tool.

Early signals from pilots

Uberall says GEO Studio has been piloted with a limited set of customers, with early access brands reporting meaningful lifts in AI-driven visibility. While the company hasn’t shared specific benchmarks, customer feedback suggests the real value lies in visibility itself—finally being able to see how AI systems interpret a brand.

Audika’s Digital Marketing Manager, Dylan Paul, described the platform as the first tool that provides clear insight into AI-generated answers and competitive positioning. The ability to analyze prompts, identify gaps, and generate brand-aligned content “in seconds” highlights a key benefit: speed.

In AI-driven discovery, delays can be costly. If incorrect data propagates through AI systems, fixing it weeks later may be too late.

A broader MarTech signal

GEO Studio reflects a broader shift underway across MarTech and local marketing. As generative AI reshapes discovery, new categories are emerging alongside familiar ones. Just as SEO once professionalized website optimization, GEO is positioning itself as the discipline for AI-era visibility.

Uberall’s partnership with AthenaHQ underscores that this isn’t just about content generation—it’s about enterprise-grade optimization at scale. Producing locally relevant, on-brand, AI-readable content for hundreds or thousands of locations has historically been impractical. Automation makes it feasible, but only if it’s grounded in accurate data.

For multi-location brands in retail, healthcare, hospitality, and services, the implications are significant. AI is rapidly becoming the front door to local discovery, and brands that can’t see—or influence—how AI represents them risk becoming invisible by default.

The next battleground: AI recommendations

Perhaps the most important subtext in Uberall’s announcement is the word “recommended.” AI systems don’t just surface options; they often narrow them down. When consumers ask for the “best” nearby option, AI agents increasingly act as gatekeepers.

GEO Studio is designed to influence that recommendation layer by strengthening the signals AI uses to make decisions: accuracy, relevance, trust, and context at the local level.

That’s a higher-stakes game than ranking tenth versus fifth on a results page. In AI-driven experiences, there may be only one answer.

Uberall is betting that brands are ready to treat AI visibility as a first-class marketing channel. If that bet pays off, GEO may soon become as foundational as SEO—just optimized for a very different kind of engine.

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