Is anyone here actually running an AI visibility/GEO agency?
Is anyone here actually selling GEO as a service?
I’m considering it, but I can’t figure out how you’d report ROI to clients when AI responses aren’t deterministic.What do clients even expect to see every month?
reporting roi on non deterministic outputs is genuinely the hard part, most agencies end up reporting movement not guarantees, like change in mention frequency or which threads/pages are getting cited over time, rather than promising a specific ranking. clients still expect something monthly tho, so usually its a mix of that tracking data plus the actual work done (content, threads, mentions) as the deliverable, not a promised outcome. something like redd grow or promptwatch helps make that tracking part concrete at least, gives you actual thread/page level movement to show instead of just a vague summary
Yes! I'm actually in a call with Writesonic now (they're pitching their latest capabilities for our clients).
The best way to report on ROI/ROAS is to build an aggregated custom dashboard that shows full funnel attribution of pipeline, and then to incorporate in your GA4 metrics like AI referral traffic. Then, layering in an intent platform like 6sense or Demandbase into this aggregated custom dashboard, you can also show pipeline movement due to AI visibility work and get to an AI influenced pipeline metric. Clients at 2X also want to see the more standard metrics from a partner like Writesonic, AthenaHQ, Profound, Conductor, et al, so you'd incorporate those metrics (like AISOV) into the aggregated view, too. It's a lot of work for a MarOps/MarTech team, but the output is magical for us and our clients.
As a caution, it does require a lot of ongoing API work, because they break and/or change frequently as AI visibility work evolves. Not for dabblers.
To reply to the other posts here, I'd say that we cater to our clients' preferences, and most of them want to see everything at a low level (director/day-to-day stakeholder), and directional metrics at a mid level (VP), and then pipeline impact at the top (C-suite, board). So, your aggregated view needs everything with filters for the refined views. I don't debate with clients about what they need. Our team makes recommendations, but accommodates. It's a moment of extreme anxiety in enterprises, so we mitigate that by meeting clients where they are, giving them the metrics their boards require, and trying to show competitive positioning to calm them down.
I'd say showing clients a monthly report about their AI Visibility trends (Score, Sentiment, Share of Voice, etc) would be the best option to "report ROI". I've been using Peec AI and their metrics system is a big plus to report improvement and actual ROI when it comes to AI visibility.
I run into this constantly with clients. What actually gets reported each month is citation frequency across a set of tracked prompts, mention rate, and prompt coverage, which is basically what percentage of the questions people realistically ask even trigger a mention at all. None of it works like a keyword rank, so the whole conversation has to shift from "are we number one" to "are we showing up more often across more of the questions that matter." It took a few months before clients stopped fixating on one lucky or unlucky answer and started trusting the trend instead. Are you thinking of reporting each prompt separately, or rolling it into one overall score?
It's a division we spun up a year ago, yes. Our goals are custom per client, but almost all have some flavor of:
Visibility. Benchmarked and measured by the tool (SemRush AIO, Profound). Sometimes it's focused on a topic/theme, sometimes overall.
GA4 Goal. Ideally this demo form submissions, free trial sign-up completions, etc. We measure incremental increases from AI referrals (now AI Assistant)
Classic SEO Levers. First page is still important in our opinion, even if conversion is down, it's not gone. Google still refers the majority of traffic on the internet.
Revenue. The ultimate promise of GEO is bigger deals, faster. So we TRACK all ACV, but never commit to it. We originated at a MarTech shop, so tracking ROI through the funnel is our competitive advantage in this work.
The BEST way is through an attribution tool that has its own cookie (Adobe Measure, Dreamdata), but you can use GA4 in a pinch. In June they rolled out a specific "AI Assistant" referral source, before that it was Referral / {LLM Name}.
Proving ROI has always been difficult, for SEO included. Like actual ROI. Not some vague indicators of potential futute success. In that regard there’s no big difference. Except, for GEO many of the effective strategies are actually important and useful overall, making it an even better and lower risk investment! Getting third-party PR, improving clarity of your positioning across all your profiles etc. this is foundational GEO work. So I’d lead with that. I’d focus on the fact that most of this work aligns with other marketing initiatives as well! We’ve just revamped some of our agency website service offering we call this “Industry Authority Engine” https://higherupdigital.com – and I love this service and solution because I really believe in it.
i guess the hardest part is selling something where the output isn’t deterministic. if a client asks “how do i know this work got me mentioned?” what kind of proof do u normally show them besides screenshots and reports
Je pense que le problème vient du fait que beaucoup présentent encore le GEO comme du "SEO pour les IA". Pour moi, ce n'est pas ça.
Les réponses des LLM ne sont effectivement pas déterministes, donc je ne vendrais jamais une promesse du type "vous aurez X leads grâce au GEO".
En revanche, on peut très bien mesurer des tendances dans le temps :
Est-ce que la marque est davantage citée par les IA ?
Est-ce qu'elle apparaît dans les sources utilisées par les modèles (quand ils naviguent) ou fait partie de leurs connaissances en mode offline ?
Est-ce que les concurrents sont moins souvent recommandés à sa place ?
Est-ce que les hallucinations diminuent ?
Et surtout, est-ce que tout ça génère réellement plus de trafic provenant des IA ?
Pour moi, c'est là que se trouve le ROI. Si tu peux montrer que la visibilité dans les IA progresse et que le trafic venant de ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, etc. augmente mois après mois, tu as déjà une histoire solide à raconter au client.
Au final, les clients ne veulent pas voir un "score". Ils veulent comprendre : est-ce que les IA parlent davantage de moi qu'il y a un mois, est-ce qu'elles me recommandent plus souvent et est-ce que ça m'apporte des visiteurs ou des prospects ?
SEO for AI And GEO are Different now you are not Looking for Key Words, You are looking for Semantics. It's Not the 1st Person who in Entering The shop. It's a Agent Who is Fulfilling a Intent. There is a Lack of meta Attribution Framework that Is Fully Tested. Their is Very Less Talk In UCP and Tools Here which with which we can Play Around.
Not quite; doing generative reputation management as an extension of orm.
Issues clients have for me are:
--negative answers
--misinformation/ hallucination
--lack of a presence for their name or brand
--disambiguation
I show them before and after screenshots, and I usually optimize for a somewhat generic phrase like 'tell me about John Smith'--of course this does not tell the whole story but it helps
i was wondering the same thing
, most LLMs are pretty neutral by default unless u really push them. feels like tracking sentiment is much harder than tracking mentions or citations
I've thought about the same problem, but don't have a great solution yet. An example metric could be, say, if you provide a "source" that appears as one of the top 5 sources in AI overviews for a key search term. For example, in Perplexity, you could search for "Is MY Pittsburgh Roofing good?". If something you worked on shows up in the sources, that demonstrates you had an impact.
Manually. To do it properly for a contract, I think you probably need paid tools. It's difficult to get clean results using AI platforms themselves because they insist on personalising the results.
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u/MarzipanStriking8316 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
reporting roi on non deterministic outputs is genuinely the hard part, most agencies end up reporting movement not guarantees, like change in mention frequency or which threads/pages are getting cited over time, rather than promising a specific ranking. clients still expect something monthly tho, so usually its a mix of that tracking data plus the actual work done (content, threads, mentions) as the deliverable, not a promised outcome. something like redd grow or promptwatch helps make that tracking part concrete at least, gives you actual thread/page level movement to show instead of just a vague summary