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Founder and researcher
Gijs Bodenstaff
Local Entity GEO and AI specialist, author and speaker
Amsterdam · more than 25 years in digital marketing
Reviews are the new backlinks.
Who is Gijs Bodenstaff?
Gijs Bodenstaff is a Dutch Local Entity GEO and AI specialist, author and speaker. Since 2010 he has worked on local visibility in Google and AI search engines. He lives in Amsterdam and founded LocalSEOLab.nl to test claims about local search visibility himself. He prefers to call himself a tester rather than an SEO parrot: whatever others publish, he first checks on his own sites and test locations.
He focuses his own continuing education on three places: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Gemini. Nobody can keep up with all of AI automation, he says, himself included. That is why he chooses.
Not an SEO parrot: test it yourself first
Gijs is not an SEO parrot. Whatever others claim about local SEO and AI visibility, he first tests on his own sites and test locations before he adopts it or writes about it. He makes one exception: Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and SparkToro. According to Gijs, Fishkin was right in more than 99 percent of cases over the past 25 years. Sometimes he was only proven right years later, as with the big Google data leak and the lawsuit against Google.
Gijs took part in Fishkin's tests himself, including the click test of April 2014 and the SparkToro study into the consistency of AI answers, as one of the volunteers who ran the prompts. What those tests showed is covered in his latest books on local SEO and AI search.
In 2015 Fishkin appeared on camera for Gijs’ agency Linkbuilding-Specialist: watch the interview Link building tips by Rand Fishkin (4 minutes, YouTube). How Gijs himself started the first link building agency in the Netherlands in 2010 is told in his story as a link building pioneer.
Work experience
- Since April 2025: AI and Reddit marketer at Redditmarketing.nl.
- 2024 to 2025: senior SEO specialist at Youvia.
- 2023 to 2024: SEO at Serve the City.
- 1998: Stageplaza.nl: co-founder (with Thijs Sins) and managing director. See the history of Stageplaza.
- 2011 to 2012: DushiDeals: came up with the concept of this deals site on Curaçao together with Marloes Meijer; Marloes founded the site. Source: Flair, column Ik vertrok (pdf).
- Company sale: together with his partner, sold one of his internet companies within three months through a sale profile on Brookz (testimonial on brookz.nl).
- Own franchise concept: international, with Europlacement.com and Globalplacement.com as formats.
- Sensi Seeds: led 25 international copywriters.
- Linkbuilding-Specialist: in 2010 the first specialized link building agency in the Netherlands, leading 25 FTE. More in Gijs as a link building pioneer.
- SPRLDX.nl: digital marketing.
- Agencies: at several agencies he set up and trained local SEO teams.
Who he worked for
Clients and employers over the years include Boskalis, Oxfam Novib, Oilily, Expedia, Nationale-Nederlanden, Sensi Seeds, SmartBuyGlasses, New York Pizza and Samenwerkende Tandartsen. In healthcare he handled local SEO and AI visibility for physiotherapists, yoga studios, psychology practices and care institutions. For franchise chains he works through FranchiseSEO.nl, for lawyers through AdvocaatSEO.nl.
His 30-minute GEO method
From the trainings on GEO and AI visibility he gave to colleagues, his own working method grew: a 30-minute GEO visibility check. He builds most things with Claude Code skills and AI agents such as Hermes and OpenClaw, and connects existing voice and chat tools through Zapier and n8n instead of building new ones.
What he tested in the lab
- A Reddit post with comments that got Gemini to create a profile in 4 minutes (March 2026).
- Two Shorts with transcripts that appeared in Google AI within an hour (April 2026).
- Review responses at the 100 largest franchise chains (2026).
- 200 purchased citations without measurable effect, carried out by Iwan Stepanova.
- Three new domains with AI content only (September 2026).
- A rental company without schema in Google AI Mode (September 2026).
- Build times and first positions of new sites (September 2026).
Local ranking factors, tested in the Netherlands every year
The major studies into local ranking factors are done for the Canadian and American markets. To the best of the lab's knowledge, Gijs is the only one in the Netherlands who tests these factors every year, together with local SEO colleagues: on his own clients, his own test sites and the local clients of local SEO specialists. In 2025 that meant more than 150 of his own sites and clients. The results are published per year on Locale Rankings (localrankingsfactoren.nl), with the local ranking factors of 2026 and the yearly archive from 2020.
Books on local SEO and AI search
All tests and studies from the lab come back in his books on local SEO and AI search (published in Dutch). An overview is on his author site gijs-bodenstaff.nl.
- Local SEO 2026, including the Zoran Hack. Buy Local SEO 2026 on Amazon
- Local Entity SEO 2027, with chapter 47 on protecting your entity. Buy Local Entity SEO 2027 on Amazon
- Local SEO & GEO voor Franchiseketens 2026 (Local SEO and GEO for franchise chains), with the citation test by Iwan Stepanova. Buy the franchise chains book on Amazon
- Franchise Local SEO & GEO Handboek 2027 (franchise handbook). Buy Franchise Local SEO & GEO Handboek 2027 on Amazon
- AI Search in de Zorg 2027 (AI search in healthcare). Buy the healthcare book on Amazon
- AI voor de uren die niemand vergoedt (AI for the hours nobody pays for). Buy the unpaid hours book on Amazon
- Local SEO & AI voor Juristen en Advocaten 2027 (for legal professionals and lawyers). Buy the lawyers book on Amazon
All titles are listed on the book overview of Gijs Bodenstaff, and on his Amazon author page, Goodreads and BookBub.
Order Local SEO 2026 on AmazonSee all books on Amazon
Certifications and roles
- Google Local Guide level 8 and Google Product Expert.
- Official beta tester of Google Labs.
- Certified in Google Ads, YouTube Ads, Google Tag Manager and Google My Business.
- Member of the DDMA Search Committee (2012) and member of IAB Netherlands.
- Guest blogger for Dutch Cowboys (2011 and 2012 and 2019), mentioned in Emerce (2012). All mentions: publications.
- Gave SEO workshops for Syntens and the Dutch Chamber of Commerce (Kamer van Koophandel).
