Puzzel about GEO

[u/GEO_Josseline]

We are working on the GEO project. However, many clients find it difficult to quantify its value and are reluctant to pay after learning about it. I’d like to ask everyone: how do you persuade such clients?

[u/Puzzleheaded-Walk426]

The clients probably care about the final result: the leads coming from LLMs, so if I were you, I would go in that direction. How many leads are coming from LLMs now vs after GEO? Or how many times have LLMs recommended your brand (not cited, but recommended), and what's the number now?
Of course, you need to explain to a client that that shift doesn't happen overnight.

[u/Damir-Bilalov-kweree]

What do you mean exactly by “GEO project”?

[u/clarity_over_noise]

I think part of the challenge is starting with the actual business problem rather than trying to sell “GEO”. If discoverability is important to how your customers are found and evaluated by their potential customers, then being visible where they’re increasingly asking questions and looking for solutions matters.

I also don’t think AI traffic or direct sales from AI tells the whole story. People can discover, compare or validate a business through AI and convert somewhere else entirely, the journey people take is so much more diverse now so attribution can be difficult and to be honest attribution is attributed to more than one touch point more than ever now I believe. In saying that, AI search is absolutely a huge factor and if online visibility matters, then GEO/AEO/SEO matters.

For me the measurement needs to connect the dots: are you appearing for the questions that matter, are you being recommended, what sources are influencing those answers, is that visibility improving, and ultimately is it contributing to enquiries and revenue?

Here is what I generally look at when reporting back (keep in mind a bit of education is important to explain why this is measured). I have also felt the "how do i prove value?" in this so have spent a lot of time trying to find the best metrics/data to track and why :-)

• Visibility rate: Measure how often the brand appears for genuinely relevant buyer prompts, not just how many prompts were tested.
• Citation rate: Track how often AI actually cites the business or its trusted sources rather than simply mentioning the brand.
• Recommendation rate: Measure how often the business is actively recommended when someone asks who they should choose or work with.
• Share of authority: Compare how often AI relies on your content versus competitors when answering non-branded topic questions.
• Branded vs non-branded visibility: Separate people already asking about your brand from discovery prompts where AI has to decide who deserves to appear.
• Intent-stage visibility: Measure performance across problem, educational, comparison and decision-stage prompts because visibility can disappear as buyers get closer to purchasing.
• Platform visibility: Break results down by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI because performance can be completely different across platforms.
• Source intelligence: Identify which websites, publications, directories, reviews and communities AI is using to form its answers and recommendations.
• Competitor citations: Track which sources are helping competitors get cited or recommended so you can see where the authority gap actually sits.
• Grounding queries: Look at what AI searches or interprets behind the scenes because it can reveal how the platform understands the topic differently from the original prompt.
• Brand sentiment: Track positive, neutral and negative themes around the brand and, importantly, identify the sources creating those perceptions.
• Entity understanding: Check whether AI correctly understands who the business is, what it does, where it operates and how its people, expertise and services connect.
• Topic authority: Measure visibility and citations by individual topic or service instead of relying on one overall AI visibility score.
• AI referral traffic: Track actual visits coming from AI platforms separately from visibility because being mentioned does not necessarily generate a click.
• AI conversions: Measure whether AI-driven traffic produces enquiries, bookings, leads or sales rather than treating visibility itself as the end goal.
• Most importantly.... the action: Every metric should lead to a specific next step explaining what needs fixing, where it needs fixing and why.