How does GEO work in the USA — and in US Spanish?

Pew surveyed 5,119 US adults on 17–23 February 2026: 49% reported using chatbots and 60% reading AI summaries in search. Its report, published on 17 June, measures adoption, not purchases attributable to AI. A separate Pew analysis tracked 900 adults in March 2025. Ordinary results received clicks on 8% of visits with an AI summary, versus 15% without one; browsing sessions ended after 26% of visits with a summary, versus 16% without. These are observed associations, not proof that summaries alone caused the difference.

For English commercial questions such as “best X in the US”, examine the sources actually cited: industry comparisons, review platforms and trade publications. Your own pages should explain the offer and its conditions; independent sources can corroborate those facts. Their relative importance depends on the category. Securing relevant coverage can take time, but no source type guarantees a recommendation.

Pew’s October 2025 report puts the US Hispanic population at 68 million in 2024. It says 68% spoke Spanish at home; this refers to people, not households. In the February 2026 survey of 5,119 adults overall, 49% of Hispanic respondents and 46% of non-Hispanic White respondents reported using chatbots. Neither finding establishes the language of their buying questions or the volume of Spanish demand.

Test real needs expressed as “mejor abogado de inmigración en Houston” or “mejor software de nómina para pequeños negocios”. Check whether Spanish pages explain local service conditions, costs and support. An information gap may justify useful content, but it does not promise category ownership or faster citations. Our guides to Hebrew in Israel and Italian in Switzerland discuss comparable language-coverage questions.

English tests should include purchase questions such as "best X in the US", state and metro variants for Texas, Miami and the Bay Area, and constraints such as "for small business" or a price limit. Spanish tests should cover equivalent needs in natural wording, including "mejor X en Estados Unidos", "cerca de mí" and questions with English brand names inside Spanish sentences.

Test the two question sets separately, using equivalent needs and comparable settings. Share of voice is your share of all recorded brand mentions in that set. A gap between languages shows a difference in the sampled answers; it is not a measure of search volume, lost revenue or the size of a market.

Peec’s analysis published on 31 March 2026 covered 30 million cited sources across five AI services in the US. G2 and Yelp ranked sixth and seventh, with Trustpilot and Clutch in the top hundred. Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia and Forbes also appeared prominently. This vendor dataset suggests sources worth checking, not a causal effect from opening a profile. Keep relevant profiles accurate and use genuine reviews; measure what happens for your questions. For a local business, Yelp matters more than that rank suggests: in our check of 170 businesses on ChatGPT's map (27 September 2026), US map cards usually showed the Yelp rating, not the Google one.

For the Spanish track, the entity must be declared bilingually: the same organization, the same facts, alternate descriptions in both languages, hreflang between the versions. Assistants notice when the Spanish description of a brand diverges from the English one — our measurement treats that language-consistency check as a first-class metric.

Our site includes English and Spanish among its nine languages, and our public case study records our own multilingual checks and their limits. For a US project, review both company pages and independent sources in each language. The initial findings and the client’s ability to serve those customers determine the order of work.

We start by testing a fixed question set in each language, measuring share of voice by assistant and checking that English and Spanish answers describe the brand consistently. The baseline shows where you appear, which competitors and sources appear instead, and where the Spanish-language results merit further work.

Semrush examined over 600,000 queries across ten industries in its US desktop database. From November 2025 to April 2026, the share of commercial searches showing AI Overviews rose by 71% on average; the study was published on 2 July 2026. That is relative growth, not 71 percentage points or a forecast of citations for an individual company. What a two-language engagement includes and costs is in our guide to a GEO agency for English and Spanish.