GEO and AI visibility, defined

Making your content more likely to be used and cited by AI assistants that answer with generated text, such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Coined in a 2023 Princeton-led paper published at KDD 2024.

An older, overlapping term for optimizing content to be used as a direct answer. Often used interchangeably with GEO.

The share of checks in which an AI assistant names your product. Named in 27 of 90 checks means 30% visibility. The most stable headline metric, because exact positions vary between runs.

Your product's name appearing in an assistant's answer, with or without a link. Matched on your name and known aliases.

Your mean position in the answer's list of products, counted only in checks where you're named. Lower is better.

Your product mentions divided by all product mentions across a set of answers. Some tools use other denominators, such as responses, so check how a number was computed.

A URL an assistant links as a source for its answer. A cited page can name you even when your own site isn't cited, which makes citations the best guide to what to fix.

Connecting a model's answer to live sources at the time of the question. Gemini's grounding with Google Search runs searches, reads the results and returns the sources it used; Claude's web search tool likewise returns cited sources.

The same question can produce different answers and different product lists on every run. Tracking therefore asks each question several times and reports rates, not single answers.

The fixed list of real user questions you track, such as 'best habit tracker app' or 'alternative to Notion'. Keep it stable so results are comparable over time.

OpenAI's search crawler. Sites that block it in robots.txt are not shown in ChatGPT search answers. Separate from GPTBot, which crawls for model training.

A robots.txt token that controls use of your content for Gemini training and grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. Google says it does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search.

Anthropic's search crawler, used to improve search results for Claude users. Anthropic says blocking it may reduce your visibility in those results. Separate from ClaudeBot (training) and Claude-User (pages fetched when someone asks Claude).