Start with a baseline audit
You cannot measure GEO progress without a starting point. Before any other work, run a structured audit: test your business against 10–15 queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini. Document exactly what each engine says — whether you appear, in what context, and which competitors are cited instead.
This baseline is your reference for every metric that follows.
The three signal categories to track
Entity signals
- Is your business name resolved consistently across all engines?
- Does a Google Knowledge Panel exist or begin to appear?
- Are your sameAs profiles consistent and complete?
Content signals
- Do your own pages appear as cited sources when engines answer questions in your category?
- Are you appearing in problem and category queries, not just branded name searches?
- How does your topical coverage compare to competitors being cited?
Reputation signals
- What is your review velocity (new reviews per month)?
- Are reviews sufficiently specific to be useful to engines reading them as data?
- Are third-party mentions (press, directories, industry sites) growing?
Re-run the audit on a quarterly cadence
AI visibility is not a metric you check once. Re-run the full audit every 90 days against the same query set. The questions you care about: has my visibility audit score improved? Am I appearing in more query types? Are the engines citing my own content rather than competitors?
The metric that matters most is movement in category and problem queries — not branded name queries, which most businesses already appear in.
