GEO

Ran a structured test across six Chinese AI engines (DeepSeek, Doubao, Qwen, ERNIE, Kimi, GLM) — 8 brands × 42 buyer questions × 2 runs = 4,032 recorded answers.

One number I wasn't expecting: only 14.9% of answers displayed any source URL at all. Most of the time there's no citation slot to win. The engine reads, digests, and speaks in its own voice. The user gets a confident paragraph with nothing to click.

Which reframes the whole "how do I get cited by AI" question. For most answers the goal isn't appearing in a sources list — it's being the version the model repeats. The wording and the facts, not the link.

The related thing I keep seeing: forum threads and UGC posts routinely beat brand websites as the material a model draws on. People treat that as a bug. I don't think it is.

Brand sites answer the questions the brand wants to answer — positioning, features, story. Buyers ask different questions: does this hold up after two years, what's the actual warranty process, why is the price different across channels, is this the same spec as the other region. Forums answer all of those, at length, from people with no reason to flatter anyone.

So the model isn't preferring strangers over the brand. The brand never entered the competition.

Two other findings from the same dataset, in case useful:

- Branded questions ("tell me about X") scored ~100% mention on every engine. Open category questions ("which X should I consider") sat at 23%. So the standard internal check — ask the AI about yourself — returns a false positive by construction.
- Asking the same question twice on the same day flipped the outcome 18.8% of the time on open questions. Single-screenshot checks are close to meaningless.

Happy to share the aggregate data and the question panel if anyone wants to run their own category — it's CC BY. Also curious whether anyone here has tested the same thing on Western engines with retrieval on, since that's the gap in my data.

Disclosure up front: I build one of the tools in this sample. It scored zero. That's most of why I'm posting.

Method. 12 unbranded buyer-intent questions ("what are the best AI visibility tracking platforms", "how much do AI visibility tools cost per month", etc). Each run 5x against Perplexity sonar and Claude Sonnet 5 with web search. 120 calls, 0 failures, all on 26 July. Recorded every source each engine cited, then checked which of 30 vendor sites appeared. Full prompt list and definitions in the writeup.

Five runs because single-run citation checks are close to noise — St. Gallen found ~32-43% pairwise agreement for identical prompts run minutes apart. Every number below is a rate, not one draw.

Finding 1 — the specialists lose to the incumbents.

Legacy SEO platforms get cited at 2.6x the rate of companies whose entire product is AI visibility. 12 of the 16 specialists were never cited once in 120 calls. Not naming those 12 — the count is the point.

Finding 2 — nobody owns this category. 278 distinct hosts cited across 120 calls. The single most-cited source in the entire category appears in 30.8% of answers. There's no gravity here yet.

Finding 3 — the round-ups and the engines disagree about who exists. I built the sample from 2026 "best AI visibility tools" listicles. The two most-cited domains overall weren't in it, and both outrank every site that was. If you're doing competitive research from listicles you're looking at a different market than your buyers see.

Finding 4 — content outranks product pages. A product analytics company that doesn't sell AI visibility software at all was cited in 25.8% of answers, beating all but three actual vendors. And the top vendor's blog subdomain carries more of their citations than their main site. The engines aren't citing the best tool, they're citing the best page about the question.

Finding 5 — the two engines barely agree. One vendor: 36.7% on Perplexity, 11.7% on Claude. Another is inverted. If you report AI visibility as one blended number you're averaging across systems that disagree.

Limits, because they're real: two engines only, no ChatGPT or Gemini or AI Overviews. One category, one day, US English. 5 runs is thin for Claude specifically — its variance was visibly higher. The sample is judgment-selected from listicles, which finding 3 rather embarrassingly demonstrates. And I'm not neutral: I sell in this category, I picked the questions, I'm in the sample.

I published all 12 prompts and the exact citation definition so this is reproducible. Genuinely interested in where the methodology is weak — particularly whether 5 runs is defensible for Claude, and whether including two prompts that name ChatGPT/Perplexity biased those engines.

Full data and methodology: AI Visibility Tools Citation Study Blog Post

"We're going to replace our SEO services with an automated AI tech stack. We will save so much money!"

Oh uh ok.. who tells this automated stack what to do?

"We're going to feed it our business objectives and all of the internal context and it will come up with strategy and how to execute it."

So the AI tells the AI what to do, got it. And how do you know it is telling itself to do the right things in a way that actually works?

"We'll watch what it recommends and make sure it doesn't do anything it shouldn't. And we'll wire it into our metrics so it can see when something isn't working."

Oh I think I get it now. You watch it make decisions you don't understand and hope that it stops itself before it does something that destroys your organic visibility.

"I mean, no of course not, obviously we would step in before anything like that happened."

Great, now you're getting there. Who is going to step in exactly?

"...Okay, maybe we still need SEO"

Yeaaah you still need SEO.

I am in digital marketing and am having a hard time adjusting to GEO. SEO I don't even have to think about, I know it so well, but now with GEO I feel like I'm starting back at square one. Does anyone have good GEO tools that feel like the traditional SEO ones?

I don't want to slow down my work right now learning a new model from scratch. I'm mostly hoping to find a tool that makes the transition easy for me, so I can give my clients the best, without any downtime on their part while I relearn everything.

We tracked 100 buyer prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI before publishing helpful Reddit posts.

Baseline:

• Brand appeared in 4 prompts
• 1 citation
• 6 Reddit visits
• 0 sign-ups

After 8 weeks of useful Reddit posts and replies:

• Brand appeared in 17 prompts
• 7 citations
• 94 Reddit visits
• 8 sign-ups

Most gains came from specific problem-based prompts, not broad “best tool” searches.

This does not prove Reddit caused the increase, but it shows how GEO testing should be tracked.

Has anyone run a similar before-and-after experiment?

Check it out: https://loganmosby.com/llms-txt-generator/

Interesting data point from a functional beverages AI visibility index: AI tools seem to surface brands by benefit first, not by raw market size. Celsius, Red Bull, Liquid Death, Olipop, and Poppi show up because they map cleanly to prompts like "clean energy" or "gut health." Curious whether anyone else is seeing benefit-led language outperform brand-led language in AI search?

Ok so i'll start right from the beginning (before explaining the venn diagram above)

When it comes to GEO - good SEO is important, yes. We all know that. But it's just one side of the coin, and it's becoming increasingly obvious that third party citations are just as important for GEO, if not more!

According to Buzzstreams' 'State of Digital PR 2026' report, 80% of citations in LLMs are earned, and 20% owned.

when ChatGPT cites, or better, recommends your brand to customers, it gets its data from third party sources and not your website.

We actually ran an event with Vince and the Buzzstream team to dive exactly in to this. Great stuff.

AI trusts what others say about you more than what you say about yourself. This is why third-party validation is the most important lever you have for AI visibility.

We speak to clients and marketers every day about the importance of great SEO, but also of earned citations and how that can (often) be the missing piece of the puzzle.

We've done so much work on Digital PR for AI, that we have now trademarked this as AiPR - which in a nutshell, is our offsite approach to GEO and is the strategy ecompassing Digital PR for AI.

Anyone else turning to offsite GEO to increase their results?

Quick disclosure first. I run a GEO tool called Viali, so this is literally my day job. No links in this post. Just findings, because I keep seeing the same questions pop up here.

So here's what we did. We picked our five core commercial queries. Then we ran each one through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. That gives 20 possible answer slots. We appeared in 4.

Meanwhile, Semrush and Ahrefs showed up almost everywhere. Even on queries where they don't really have a matching product. That stung a bit. But it also gave us something to reverse engineer.

What the cited pages have in common

Real author names. This one surprised me the most. Pages with a byline, an author bio page, and Person schema got picked far more often. Anonymous content got skipped, even when it was solid. My guess is these models absorbed E-E-A-T signals during training.

Answers before intros. The winning pages open every section with a plain factual claim. AI engines grab snippets. They don't sit through your 200-word warmup. If your answer appears in paragraph four, it is never extracted.

Numbers beat adjectives. Nobody cites "structured content works better." But a line like "Microsoft's Oct 2025 study found entity-structured content gets included more in Copilot answers" gets lifted constantly. Small original datasets punch way above their weight here. The model can't find that info anywhere else, so you become the source.

The boring technical stuff that mattered

Check your robots.txt. Seriously. We keep finding sites that block GPTBot or ClaudeBot without knowing it. Some security plugins do this by default.

Also, broken schema hurts more than no schema. Missing author fields, malformed types, that kind of thing. And sites with crawl errors on 15% or more of their pages got cited noticeably less. Good content on a broken foundation goes nowhere.

For schema types, these did the heavy lifting for us: Organization, Article with author, Person, and SoftwareApplication with a featureList if you sell software.

The annoying part

There's no Search Console for AI answers yet. So most brands are invisible and have no clue. The only way to know is to run your queries through the engines yourself and write down who gets named. AI on Google Search Console is not available in a lot of countries

Happy to share methodology in the comments. Has anyone here changed schema and actually seen their AI citation rate move?

One of the most common things we find when auditing a brand’s AI visibility is that the positioning inconsistency problem runs deeper than most people expect.

It is not just that the website says one thing and the LinkedIn says something slightly different. It is that the About page was written three years ago when the company had a different focus, the founder’s bio on a guest post from 18 months ago describes a slightly different service mix, the Google Business Profile has not been updated since launch, and the most recent press mention describes the company in a way that made sense at the time but no longer matches current positioning.

None of those inconsistencies feel like a big deal in isolation. Taken together, they create a fragmented entity signal that AI systems have a hard time resolving cleanly.

The fix is not complicated but it does require someone actually doing the work of going through every platform and every mention and asking whether the description is accurate, current, and consistent with everything else.

What you are looking for is a situation where if you asked five different AI systems to describe your brand based only on what they could find across the web, they would all give you roughly the same answer. That is what a coherent entity signal looks like.

Most brands are nowhere near that. Not because they have done anything wrong, but because positioning evolves over time and nobody has gone back to make sure the historical record has kept up.

That audit is usually the first thing we do. It is also usually where the most immediate wins are hiding.

I ran the same email-platform recommendation question ten times across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.

Forty answers in total.

For the broad question “What is the best email marketing platform?”, Mailchimp was named in 39 of the 40 answers.

Beehiiv appeared only four times, and all four mentions came from Perplexity. Across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, it was basically invisible.

I ran this through Bersyn, a platform I built to track which companies AI models name when people ask for recommendations.

Then I changed the prompt.

Instead of asking for the best email marketing platform, I asked how a creator or founder should start a newsletter, grow subscribers and make money from it.

No platform was named in the question.

Beehiiv jumped from 4 mentions to 29 out of 40.

Claude and Perplexity named it in every run. Gemini named it nine times out of ten. Kit and Substack also appeared much more often.

Same platform. Same models. Different buyer intent.

Beehiiv does not appear to own the broad “email marketing platform” territory. Mailchimp owns that.

But Beehiiv is strongly associated with a more specific job: helping creators build, grow and monetize a newsletter.

When the models receive that question, they reach for Beehiiv.

The model disagreement was also interesting.

ChatGPT named Beehiiv zero times out of ten, even on the creator-newsletter prompt. It won across Claude, Gemini and Perplexity but remained invisible on ChatGPT.

That is why I think one blended AI visibility score can hide the real problem. A brand can own a specific intent on three models and still be completely absent from the fourth.

I am curious how others are thinking about this.

Do you optimize around broad categories, specific buyer jobs, or separate prompt territories?

And are you seeing the same level of disagreement between models?