Getting cited in AI Overviews when you are a local service business

Answer engines quote sources that state facts plainly and can be verified elsewhere. For a limo company that means route pages with real prices, not a page of adjectives.

Generative and answer engine optimisation is not a separate channel from SEO. It is the same entities, the same crawlable HTML, and a writing style that puts the answer in the first sentence.

Local service businesses lose citations when every page is a slogan. Models look for a number, a place, a time window and a named service. If those live only in a PDF or a phone script, the overview will cite whoever published them as text.

The practical build is unglamorous: one URL per route or service area, schema that matches the visible copy, internal links that treat each town as an entity, and prices you are willing to stand behind. Then you track whether you appear in the answer, not only whether you rank.

NYV Digital reports share of answer the same way we report booked calls: it is a diagnostic next to the number that pays the bills. Citation without a phone that answers is still a leak.