GEO Metrics: What to Track

TL;DR

• Track four things: presence (share of voice), retrieval (source share), representation (sentiment and accuracy), and impact (AI traffic and conversions).

• Mention, citation and visibility score are three different objects. Confusing them is the most common reporting mistake.

• Rankings and CTR no longer cover the field. Users clicked a traditional search link in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% when it did not. Pew Research Center

• Track each engine separately. One study found only 11% citation overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity, with around 50% of cited domains changing each month.

• Monthly cadence minimum, on a fixed prompt set. Single runs prove nothing.

Short answer: GEO metrics measure whether AI engines mention you, pull your pages, describe you correctly, and send qualified visitors. Everything else is noise.

Mention, citation, visibility: three different things

• Mention: the model talks about your brand or your products by name.

• Citation: the model pulls one of your pages to build its answer and signals it in the content.

• AI Visibility Score: a composite score of your brand's overall strength in LLM answers.

A brand can be mentioned constantly without ever being cited. That means competitors and third-party sites are writing your narrative for you.

The metrics that matter

1. Share of voice

How often your brand is mentioned relative to all brand mentions on your prompt set. This is the base: a brand rarely mentioned cannot score well on anything else. Track it against your top three competitors, never in absolute terms.

2. Source share

The share of answers where your own pages are pulled as a source. Low source share with high share of voice means your visibility rests on other people's content. Check which URLs actually get retrieved, since it is usually a handful of them.

3. Sentiment

The share of mentions placed in a positive context. Positive framing raises the odds of being cited again, and negative framing spreads quietly. Break it down by topic: a brand can be praised on one use case and criticized on another.

4. AI traffic volume

The estimated traffic generated by AI answers, projected from your tracked keyword set. Volumes stay small, but intent is high. Ahrefs found AI search visitors convert at a much higher rate than traditional organic visitors, despite far lower volume.

5. AI Visibility Score

The composite metric that weighs the four factors below, so you read one number and act on the factor dragging it down.

A 25% coverage with an average position of 2.0 and a sentiment of 0.70 gives a visibility score of roughly 20%.

Three secondary metrics worth adding

• Prompt coverage: how many of your tracked prompts surface your brand at all, and which ones never do. This is your content backlog.

• Topical visibility: your presence by topic, because competitors differ from one topic to the next.

• Accuracy rate: the share of answers containing no factual error about your pricing, features or positioning.

What to stop reporting

• Screenshots of a single answer. Models vary between runs.

• One engine only. Strength in Perplexity says nothing about Gemini.

• Keyword rankings as a GEO proxy. Ranking and being cited are different outcomes.

How often to measure

Monthly at minimum, on a fixed prompt set, same engines, same markets. Quarterly for strategic review. Anything more frequent measures model noise rather than your progress.

Ready to take AI visibility into your own hands?

Track every metric above across engines, with the competitive benchmark included.

Book a demo or explore our GEO platform.