How to Measure GEO: Metrics, Tools, and a Practical Starting Guide

GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the practice of improving how often and how well your brand shows up in AI-generated answers. If you’re new to the concept, start with our guide on what GEO is.

GEO is easy to talk about and hard to measure.

With SEO (traditional search engine optimization), you’re thinking in keywords. With GEO, you’re thinking in questions. The game gets more complex because users are no longer just searching short phrases and scanning links. They are asking ChatGPT full questions, then trusting the answer directly.

So if the game changes, the way we measure it has to change too.

I’ve built and grown sites through SEO for more than 10 years, long before GEO became a serious topic in 2024. Across our own companies and companies we’ve helped, we’ve executed these strategies to increase organic search traffic by 500%+, and won more than 200 high-intent prompts where competitors were already being recommended.

This article covers the basics you need to measure GEO properly, so you can start winning too.

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Understanding GEO metrics

Measuring GEO means tracking how often and how favorably your brand appears in AI-generated answers.

1. Mentions

How often AI answers name your brand.

If someone asks “What are the best project management tools for startups?” and the answer includes the text “Notion”, that counts as a mention.

2. Citations

How often AI answers cite your website, article, docs, or third-party sources about your brand.

The difference between this and Mentions is, it’s not the text of your brand name getting mentioned, but your website URL.

3. Sentiment

Whether the AI answer frames you positively, negatively, or neutrally. What pros and cons they have to say about you.

For example: “best for startups,” “enterprise-focused,” “affordable,” “easy to use.”

4. Visibility score

The percentage of tracked prompts where your brand appears.

Visibility score = prompts where your brand appears / total prompts tracked

If you track 100 prompts and your brand appears in 32 answers, your visibility score is 32%. This makes deciding which prompts to track critical. If you’re tracking the wrong prompts, this score won’t matter or may even mislead you. This is one of the most challenging points about GEO measurement.

5. Share of Voice (SOV)

How your visibility compares against competitors.

For example, across 100 prompts:

• Competitor A appears 50 times
• Competitor B appears 38 times
• Your brand appears 24 times

That tells you who owns the AI answer layer in your category. This is similar to the concept of market share of revenue, except, it’s your share of voice.

6. Recommendation rate

This is the metric people often confuse with mentions.

Every recommendation is a mention, but not every mention is a recommendation.

A recommendation is a mention with endorsement. The AI does not just name your brand. It suggests that your brand is a good fit for the user’s question.

Recommendation rate = prompts where your brand is recommended / total prompts tracked

For example, if your brand appears in 40 out of 100 prompts but is only recommended in 10, your visibility score is 40%, but your recommendation rate is 10%. This can get tricky because recommendation rate depends on how the user asks the question.

A broad research prompt may produce an objective list without recommending any single brand:

Research the most visible tool options for getting SOC 2 compliance. List out their positioning, pros and cons, and pricing.

But a decision-oriented prompt is much more likely to trigger a recommendation:

What should I use for SOC 2? I’m a startup in fintech with $5M raised.

That is why recommendation rate should be measured across prompts with clear buying intent, not just broad research prompts. Otherwise, you may undercount how often AI would recommend you when the user is actually looking for a decision.

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Starting to measure: think prompts, not keywords

To measure GEO, you first need to know what questions you’re measuring against.

In SEO, you usually start with keywords. A keyword is a short phrase someone might search on Google, like:

AI video generator

In GEO, you start with prompts.

A prompt is the full question someone would ask an AI engine. It includes the topic, context, intent, and sometimes also constraints.

Instead of thinking:

What keyword do I want to rank for?

Think:

What would my buyer actually ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Google?

That question is your prompt.

For example, if you’re in the AI video space, a keyword might be:

AI video generator

But the prompts could be:

• What is the best AI video generator for mass producing YouTube Shorts?
• Which AI video tool should I use to turn my product image into an ad?
• What are the best Runway alternatives that are cheaper?

These prompts reveal much more intent and user context than the keyword alone.

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Measuring competitors

GEO measurement is not just about whether you show up. It is also, and often more importantly, about who shows up instead.

This is one of the favorite places to look for 2 reasons. One, it gives me so much competitive drive to do better and win. Two, it shows a real competitive map, and your competitors are often your best teachers. There’s so much to learn and digest for your product.

This is where share of voice becomes useful. In the metrics section, we defined share of voice as how your visibility compares against competitors. Competitor measurement is how you break that number down and understand what is actually happening behind it.

My recommended workflow is to first identify the 5 most prominent competitors you care about. Then, for every prompt you track, look at who shows up. You will find your handpicked competitors appearing here and there. You will also find brands outside of the 5 you originally chose. This is also gold because it can reveal a competitor you should care about that you’re not yet aware of.

From there, identify the gaps:

• where competitors show up but you do not
• where competitors show up above you
• where competitors sound stronger than you

If you ask:

What are the best AI video tools for making product ads?

And the answer recommends three competitors but not you, that is not just a visibility problem. It means AI does not yet see your brand as a strong answer for that use case.

The next question is:

Why did the AI choose them?

Maybe their landing page explains this specific use case better. Then you should make a landing page that does that.

Maybe they are recommended in more third-party articles. Then you want to find a way to partner with more people and get them to talk about you.

This is where you start shipping the real work: build a better product, explain it more clearly, and produce the content that proves you, are the answer.

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Tools that help measure GEO

You can start measuring GEO manually with a spreadsheet. In fact, I recommend doing this first. Don’t jump ahead to some random tool that might confuse you instead of clarify things for you.

Follow the sections above to pick 5 prompts, then open an Incognito window. Don’t use your own browser tab, since it may be biased toward you. Type a prompt into Google, and note down Google AI Overview’s answer using the GEO metrics we covered. You don’t need to start fancy. This is just to help you internalize the idea. Run each prompt 5 times in a new Incognito window.

Of course, it’s unrealistic and absolutely stupid to try to do this by hand forever. Because you want to track 20 prompts, not 5. You want to ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and every platform you care about, not just Google AI Overview. So now it’s shopping time to automate this as much as possible at a good cost.

You do not need a giant software stack to measure GEO. Most tools fall into three buckets. You also don’t want to spend time scrambling an in-house tool. It takes ages to get every detail right, and you want to get back to your product instead of wasting time on this.

1. New-age GEO and growth tools

I call these the new-age tools because they’re built for one step beyond the traditional keyword mindset. These tools help you see the measurements we talked about.

• Bonemeal: best for tracking GEO signals and turning them into content actions automatically.
• Profound: best for enterprise AI visibility monitoring and deep reporting.
• Peec AI: best for tracking brand mentions and citations across AI engines.

This is the most direct category if your main question is “Are AI engines recommending us or our competitors?” and you want to know how that changes weekly and monthly.

2. SEO platforms with AI visibility features

These tools are useful if you already have an SEO workflow and want to see AI visibility in the same system.

• Semrush: best for SEO-heavy teams that want AI visibility alongside keywords.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar: best for teams already using Ahrefs that want to monitor brand visibility.
• Similarweb: best for larger teams that care about granular traffic optimization.

These are helpful when GEO is part of a broader search strategy, not a standalone workflow.

3. Analytics tools

These tools are critical but often overlooked. I see companies staring at a GEO dashboard for 2 months feeling lost. That’s because you need to see this loop close inside your business as real impact.

• GA4: best for tracking AI referral traffic and conversions.
• Google Search Console: best for tracking branded search lift, impressions, and page performance.
• PostHog or Amplitude: best for connecting AI-driven traffic to deeper in-product behavior across the full conversion funnel of discovery, conversion, and retention.

The important part is not just collecting more data. It is knowing which data points matter, and what to do about them.

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Now that you measured GEO, what next?

Measurement is where you start, not where you stop.

Now you:

• create pages that answer high-intent prompts directly
• update existing pages with clearer positioning
• write comparison and alternative pages
• get mentioned in credible third-party sources
• refresh outdated content
• keep tracking whether answers change, and whether business impact follows

The point of GEO measurement is not to stare at a score. The point of GEO is to feed that learning back into your business.

When you're ready to go deeper into a full action playbook, read: [How to Improve GEO]