Where Do You Stand With GEO?

George Zlatin

By George Zlatin

A Simple Way to Measure Your AI Search Readiness

The way people find information is changing and your audience is using AI, whether you’re optimized for it or not. According to DTC’s own survey, 1 in 3 business owners are anxious about how AI search and the changed landscape will affect their business.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) isn’t about rewriting old pages and crossing your fingers that ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, or other answer engines take notice. The shift is more fundamental than that.

Google Search is almost certainly still your top traffic referrer, but search behavior is quietly evolving around it. AI is quickly becoming the starting point for research.  In fact, 37% of consumers said they begin their research with AI tools rather than traditional search engines, according to this recent study. 

If you’re not seeing much referral traffic from ChatGPT or similar platforms, don’t mistake that for absence. People are actively researching on AI tools, getting recommendations, and then heading to Google to find the specific companies those tools surfaced. In your analytics, that journey looks like direct, organic, or paid traffic and the AI’s role in it is invisible.

So how should companies evaluate themselves?

All companies fall on a spectrum, and there is a maturity curve. But here is the shortened version:

  • If GEO still feels like screenshots and guesswork, you are behind.
  • If you are tracking visibility but cannot explain why AI recommends some brands more than yours, you are on par.
  • If you are measuring, diagnosing, and actively improving content, technical readiness, and citation sources in a repeatable way, you are ahead.

First, what GEO actually means

GEO stands for generative engine optimization. You may also hear it called AI SEO or AEO.

Whatever label you use: your brand needs to be visible inside AI-generated answers, not just in traditional search results.

In traditional SEO, the target is often a set of keywords. In GEO, the target is a broader topic. A person asks a question, the platform expands that question into related ideas/sub-topics, pulls information from multiple sources, and then synthesizes an answer. So you are not trying to win one query. You are trying to be consistently useful across a whole cluster of related keywords and sub-topics.

GEO is not an on/off switch. It is a maturity curve.

One of the biggest mistakes we see is treating GEO like a yes-or-no initiative.

GEO doesn’t require starting from scratch. Strong traditional SEO signals like authoritative content, clean site structure, and quality backlinks remain one of the biggest factors in how well your brand surfaces in AI-generated answers. If you’ve invested in SEO fundamentals, you’re not behind; you have a foundation to build on.

You are not either “doing it” or “not doing it.” Most companies fall somewhere on a spectrum, especially if the already have a good SEO presence. Once you know where you sit, your next steps become much clearer.

Behind: You are probably behind if GEO still feels random

This is the exploration stage.

Maybe your team has tested a few prompts in ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews. Maybe you noticed a competitor showing up. Maybe your brand appeared once, disappeared the next day, and now nobody knows what to make of it.

That does not mean you have a GEO program. It means you have curiosity.

At this stage, companies usually have no defined prompt set, no tracking cadence, and no reliable way to answer basic questions like:

  • Are we showing up at all?
  • For which prompts?
  • Against which competitors?
  • With what sources being cited?
  • Is AI describing us correctly?

If you cannot answer those questions, you are still early.That is not a criticism. It is just the reality for a lot of brands right now.

Signs you are behind

  • You check AI results manually once in a while, but nothing is tracked consistently.
  • You have no idea whether you have a citation problem, a trust problem, or a content problem.
  • You are reacting to screenshots instead of measuring trends.

What to do next

Stop guessing. Start measuring.

Start by defining the prompts that matter. The conversations where your brand should show up.

That means identifying a prompt universe: the questions prospects ask across your service lines.  This is not the same as keywords. When selecting prompts, don’t focus on 10 different ways people ask the same question.  Focus on varied prompts that have different meanings and surface different responses about your brand (or your competitors). You want to be known for different topic areas in your industry, not just singular prompts.

Once that is in place, you can track whether your brand appears, how often, and in what context.

On Par: You are probably on par if you are tracking visibility but still missing the “why”

This is where a lot of solid marketing teams are landing right now.

You have moved past casual testing. You are monitoring good prompts, comparing performance across platforms, and starting to see patterns. That is a big step forward.

But visibility alone is not enough.

Just because your brand is mentioned does not mean you show up consistently. Just because you show up does not mean the answer is accurate. And just because you are present does not mean you are the source being cited.

This is the stage where smarter questions start to matter:

Are we being cited (linked to) or just mentioned?
Is AI describing our brand the way we want it to?
Which publishers, directories, or third-party sites are shaping the answer?
Are competitors owning the trusted sources?
Are our own pages easy for AI systems to quote and summarize?

That is where diagnosis begins.

Signs you are on par

  • You have a tracked set of prompts and some level of share-of-voice data. 
  • You are comparing your visibility against competitors.
  • You have started looking at citations, mentions, and have a strategy for gaining more of them. 

What to do next

This is the point where the work gets more strategic. You need to separate visibility from brand trust.

A strong GEO audit should help answer at least four things:

  • What prompts matter most.
  • How often you show up.
  • Who is beating you.
  • What sources AI is using to form opinions.

From there, you can diagnose the real issue. Sometimes the problem is outdated on-site content. Sometimes the content is too wordy and doesn’t directly answer the question. Sometimes AI keeps citing competitor sites because your own pages are not distinct or extractable enough to earn the citation.

Some companies just need more content, but some need better content architecture, stronger citation source signals, and a clearer plan.

Ahead: You are probably ahead if GEO is already part of your operating system

This is where execution starts to compound.

At this stage, GEO is no longer a research project. It is a living measurement and optimization process. You are not relying on one-off checks. You are tracking trends over time, spotting gaps, prioritizing fixes, and tying the work back to business goals.

That is a very different level of maturity.

Signs you are ahead

  • You have a stable prompt universe tied to revenue-driving topics.
  • You track mentions, citations, share of voice, and source patterns across platforms.
  • You understand whether the problem is visibility, trust, technical readiness, or brand perception.
  • You have an active backlog of quick wins and a roadmap for deeper improvements.
  • You are using GEO data to guide content, technical SEO, digital PR, and brand positioning decisions.

What companies ahead on GEO do differently

They make information easy to extract. They do not bury the answer three scrolls down the page. They define terms clearly. They surface key facts early. They use useful formatting. They support pages with structured data where it makes sense. They clean up internal linking. They reduce content overlap. They strengthen the sources around the brand, not just the site itself.

They also understand something a lot of teams miss: citations are a core part of the strategy.

If AI tools keep citing the same publishers, directories, associations, or third-party resources in your space, that is meaningful. That is a roadmap. It tells you where trust already exists and where your brand needs a stronger presence.

What a good GEO audit should actually give you

Companies do not need another vague audit. They need a baseline and a plan for where to start.

A useful GEO audit should tell you:

  • What prompts matter most to your business.
  • Where your brand shows up today.
  • How you compare to competitors.
  • What sources are shaping AI answers.
  • Whether AI understands your brand accurately.
  • Whether your site is structured to be retrieved and reused.
  • What quick wins to implement now.
  • What long term strategies should you incorporate? 

That is why the best GEO work usually spans multiple layers at once: prompt tracking, visibility, citations, brand perception, entity signals, technical readiness, schema, answerability, and action planning.

With that structure, GEO becomes something you can actually manage and improve upon, rather than just noise.

The takeaway

You do not need to panic about GEO. But you also should not ignore it.

One thing worth setting expectations on upfront: GEO improvements don’t show up overnight. Most AI models are trained on data snapshots that aren’t updated continuously, which means changes you make today may not be reflected until a newer model version is released. That’s not a reason to wait, it’s a reason to start now.

The companies falling behind are not necessarily the ones with bad websites. They are the ones treating AI search like a trend instead of a shift in how information gets discovered and reused.

The companies moving forward are doing something much simpler: they are defining what visibility should look like, measuring it consistently, diagnosing the gaps, and turning that into an execution plan.

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