Coworking Marketing #70 - Be the Coworking Space AI Recommends

Hey there,

Rosee from Cobot here!

When someone asks Google for "coworking spaces in Brooklyn," they get ten links to choose from. When they ask ChatGPT, they get three names. There's no second page and no fallback list.

That selectiveness is measurable. In a 2026 study of over 350,000 business locations, SOCi found that ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of them, compared to a 35.9% appearance rate in Google's local results, roughly 30 times more selective. The study looked at multi-location brands rather than independent spaces, but the direction is clear: AI names far fewer

businesses than traditional search, so being one of them matters more.

Good news: you don't need a new strategy. You need tighter fundamentals and a few new habits. Here's what works, starting with what the terms even mean.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of getting your website to rank in a search engine's results, the familiar list of blue links on Google. It's the oldest of the three and still the foundation.

👉 For deeper insights into the SEO foundation, see SEO Part 1 and SEO Part 2.

AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is about getting your content picked as the direct answer to a question, the kind that shows up in a featured snippet or gets read aloud by a voice assistant, rather than as one link among ten.

GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, is the newest term. It's the work of getting your space named inside an answer written by a generative AI tool like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini.

The useful part: it all rests on SEO. In its official guide on optimizing for AI search, Google says that optimizing for generative AI is, from its perspective, still optimizing for search. Strong SEO is the foundation and does most of the work. AEO and GEO are the optimization you layer on top, worth doing, but not a separate discipline you're behind on.

AI recommendations are winner-take-few. When ChatGPT names three coworking spaces in Berlin, the ones not named don't get a "see more" link. They just don't exist for that prospect.

One experiment worth reading: a marketer tested ChatGPT's Agent Mode with a real coworking search in New York. The AI didn't just scan amenities and pricing. It looked at community photos, member spotlights, event pages, and blog tone. It was reading for vibe. That's the part your website has to convey now, not just the desk count.

Before anything else, audit what you already have. Most of the AI-visibility work is already-good SEO.

If your pricing lives inside a PDF, or your day pass info is only on Instagram, AI can't cite you. Make the answers easy to lift.

AI models pull from content that sounds like a real answer. Not marketing copy. Not "unlock your potential." Answers.

Add an FAQ page (or expand yours) with questions phrased the way people actually search:

Start each answer with a direct sentence. Then add detail. This same structure works for your pricing page, your amenities page, and your booking flow. Answer-first, detail-second is the format both Google's snippet algorithm and ChatGPT prefer.

Landing pages per persona help too. A page for "coworking for freelancers in [neighborhood]" and one for "meeting rooms for small teams" give AI clear, specific pages to match against clear, specific queries. We broke down the four most common coworking personas and how to tailor your message to each in an earlier edition.

You've now covered the half you control outright: an accurate Business Profile, consistent listings, a crawlable site, and pages that answer real questions in plain language. Get these right, and you're already ahead of most spaces in your city.

That's the on-site half. The other half — the mentions, reviews, and third-party signals AI leans on most — comes next edition.

👉 Try it now: ask ChatGPT "coworking in [your neighborhood]" and hit reply to tell me how it went. Named or not, it's a great first step, and if you're not showing up yet, reply anyway,

I'm happy to take a look and point you in the right direction. 💙

See you in two weeks, and happy coworking! 🥳

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Coworking Software

Cobot Coworking Software, 2026