How to know if your GEO is working

Let’s get one thing straight before the industry turns “GEO” into yet another three-letter source of confusion.

Generative engine optimization isn’t SEO with a new hat and a LinkedIn carousel. It’s a fundamentally different game.

If you’re still debating whether to swap the “S” for a “G,” you’ve already missed the point.

At its core, GEO is brand marketing expressed through generative interfaces.

Treat it like a technical tweak, and you’ll get technical-tweak results: plenty of noise, very little growth.

CMOs, this is where you step in.

SEOs, this is where you either evolve or get automated into irrelevance.

The question isn’t what GEO is – that’s been done to death.

It’s how to tell if your GEO is actually working.

The North Star: Share of search (not ‘share of voice,’ not ‘topical authority’)

The primary metric for GEO is the same one that should already anchor any brand-led growth program: share of search.

Les Binet didn’t coin a vanity metric for dashboards. 

Share of search is a leading indicator of future market share because it reflects relative demand – your brand versus competitors.

If your share is rising, someone else’s is falling, and the future tilts your way. 

If it’s declining, you’re mortgaging tomorrow’s revenue. That’s the unglamorous magic of it.

It isn’t perfect. But across category after category, share of search predicts brand outcomes with a level of accuracy that should make “awards case studies” blush.

And yes, GEO affects it, often through PR. 

When an LLM recommends your brand (linked or not), some users still open a new tab and Google you. 

Recommendation sparks curiosity. Curiosity drives search. Search is the signal.

Expect branded search volume to rise as generative usage grows, because people back-check what they see in AI results. 

It’s messy human behavior, but it’s consistent.

Your first diagnostic: plot your brand’s share of search against your closest competitors. 

Use Google Trends or My Telescope for branded demand, and triangulate with Semrush. 

Watch the trend, not the weekly wobbles.

And do not confuse share of search with share of voice. 

Different metric. Different lineage. Different purpose.

Dig deeper: From search to answer engines: How to optimize for the next era of discovery

The two halves of the signal: Brand demand and buyer intent

Share of search has two practical layers for GEO diagnostics:

• Brand search: The purest signal of salience. Are more people looking for you than last quarter, relative to the category? That’s how you know your brand availability is increasing inside generative engines and the culture around them.
• Buyer-intent traffic: The money end. Of your non-branded search clicks, how much is clearly commercial or buyer-intent versus informational fluff? And how does your share of that buyer-intent traffic compare to competitors?

You won’t know a rival’s exact click-through rates – and you don’t need to.

Use Semrush to estimate non-branded commercial demand at the topic level for you and them, then compare proportions. 

Cross-reference with your own Google Search Console (GSC) data. 

Export everything and segment aggressively by intent. 

Where tool estimates diverge from your actuals, you’ll learn something about the noise in third-party data and the real shape of your market.

If your brand search is flat but buyer-intent share is rising, congratulations – you’re harvesting demand but not creating enough of it.

If brand search is rising but buyer-intent share isn’t, you have a conversion or content problem – your GEO is sparking curiosity, but your site and assets aren’t turning that into qualified traffic.

If both are up, pour fuel.

If both are down, stop fiddling with prompts and fix your positioning, advertising, and PR.

Dig deeper: Fame engineering: The key to generative engine optimization

Category entry points: The prompts behind the prompts

GEO lives or dies on category entry points (CEPs) – Ehrenberg-Bass’ useful term for the situations, needs, and triggers that put buyers into the category.

CEPs are how real people think.

“I just left the gym and I’m thirsty.” That’s why there’s a Coke fridge by the exit.

“I’ve just come out of a show near Covent Garden and need food now.” That’s why certain restaurants cluster and advertise there.

These are not keywords. They’re human contexts that later materialize as words.

Translating that to GEO: your customers’ prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Mode reflect their CEPs.

Newly appointed marketing manager under pressure to fix organic? That’s a CEP.

Fed up with a current tool because the price doubled and support disappeared? Another CEP.

Map the CEPs first, then outline the prompt families that those CEPs produce. 

The wording will vary, but the thematic spine stays consistent: a role, a pain, a job to be done, a timeframe.

Once you’ve mapped CEPs to prompt families, you can evaluate your prompt visibility – how often and in what context generative engines surface you as a credible option.

This is a brand job as much as a content job. 

LLMs don’t “decide” like humans. They triangulate across signals and citations to reduce uncertainty. 

Distinctive brand assets, third-party coverage (PR), credible reviews, and consistent evidence of capability all raise your odds of being recommended.

Notice I didn’t say “more blog posts.” We’ll come back to that.

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Measure prompt visibility, then validate in GSC

Once you’ve outlined your prompt families, test visibility systematically.

Run qualitative checks in the major models. Log the sources they cite and the types of evidence they appear to weight.

Are you visible when the CEP is “newly promoted CMO, six-month plan to grow organic pipeline”?

Are you visible when it’s “VP of ecommerce losing non-brand traffic to marketplace competitors, needs an alternative”?

If you’re absent, don’t complain about model bias – earn your spot with PR, credible case studies, and assets that reinforce what the engines are trying to prove about you.

Next, switch to the quantitative side. 

In GSC, build regex filters for conversational queries – the long, natural-language strings (4 to 10 words, often more) that resemble prompts with the serial numbers filed off.

We don’t yet know how much of this traffic comes from bots, LLM scaffolding, or humans typing into AI-powered SERPs, but we do know it’s there.

Track impressions, clicks, and the proportion that are clearly buyer-intent versus informational. 

If your conversational query clicks are growing and skewing commercial, that’s a strong signal your GEO is turning curiosity into consideration.

The two-second rule: Why informational content won’t save you

Here’s a hard truth for the SEO content mills: informational traffic is about to become even less valuable.

Most AI citations offer only fleeting exposure. 

Brand recall takes more than a glance – in both lab and field data, you get roughly two seconds of attention to make anything stick. 

Most sidebar mentions and AI Overview snippets don’t deliver that, and the memory fades fast anyway.

If your GSC export shows that 70% or more of your clicks come from “how-to” mush with no buyer intent, your GEO isn’t working. 

It’s subsidizing the LLMs that will summarize you out of existence.

Fix the mix – shift your asset portfolio toward category entry points that actually precede purchase.

Dig deeper: Revisiting ‘useful content’ in the age of AI-dominated search

A simple GEO scoreboard for grown-ups

Here’s your weekly CMO/SEO standup. Four lines, no fluff.

1. Share of search (brand) 

Your brand’s share versus your top three competitors, trended over 13 weeks. 

Up is good. Flat is a warning. Down means it’s time to get comms and PR moving.

2. Share of buyer-intent traffic

Your estimated share of non-brand commercial clicks versus competitors (from tool triangulation), plus your actual buyer-intent clicks from GSC. 

The gap between the two is your reality check.

3. Prompt visibility index

For each priority CEP, how often are you recommended by major models, and with what supporting evidence? 

• Track monthly. 
• Celebrate gains. 
• Fix absences with PR and proof.

4. Conversational query conversion

Impressions and clicks on 4–10+ word natural-language queries, segmented by intent. 

Are the commercial ones rising as a share of total? If not, your GEO is a content cost center, not a growth driver.

How to read the scoreboard

• If those four lines are improving together, your GEO is working.
• If only one is improving, you’re playing tactics without strategy.
• If none are improving, stop thinking you can “Wikipedia” your way to growth with topical-authority fluff.

The levers that actually move GEO

What moves the dial? Not more “SEO content.” GEO responds to the levers of brand availability:

• PR that builds credible third-party evidence: Reviews, analyst notes, earned features, and founder or expert commentary with substance. LLMs love corroboration.
• Distinctive assets used consistently: Names, taglines, proof points, tone. Engines triangulate. Recognizable signals reduce ambiguity.
• Customer-centered case studies: Framed around CEPs, not your product roadmap. “Marketing manager replaces X to cut acquisition costs in 90 days” beats “New feature launch.”
• Tighter copy: Precise, functional language matched to CEPs and prompt families. Kill the poetry.
• Experience signals: Your site must resolve buyer intent fast. The conversation from AI should land on pages that continue – not restart – the dialogue.

Content still matters, but only as support for these levers.

Most of your old blog inventory was never going to build memory or distinctiveness, and in an AI-summarized world, it certainly won’t. 

Scrap the vanity spreadsheets. Build assets that make both engines and humans more certain you’re the right choice in buying situations.

Yes, content marketing is back in a big way – but that’s another article.

GEO isn’t just SEO

When AI modes become the default interaction layer, and they will – whether through chat, answers, or blended SERPs – the game rewards brands that are easy for machines to recommend in buying moments. 

That is GEO’s beating heart: increasing AI availability. 

Think of it like free paid search. 

If you’re still obsessing over informational traffic and topical hamster wheels, you’ll be caught with the lights on and no clothes. Some of you already are.

SEOs who make the leap become organic-search strategists. 

You’ll speak CEPs, buyer intent, and brand effects. 

You’ll partner with PR, product marketing, and sales enablement. 

You’ll still use the tools – Semrush and GSC – but you’ll use them to evidence strategy, not to justify content churn.

The rest of you? You’ll be replaced by an agentic workflow that writes better filler faster than you ever could.

The humbling truth about GEO

Marketing rewards humility. 

You are not the consumer, and you are certainly not the model. 

Stop guessing. Measure the four lines. 

• Map the category entry points. 
• Build the assets that make you easy to recommend. 
• Cross-reference tool estimates with your own data and let the differences teach you. 

GEO isn’t mystical – it’s brand marketing meeting machine mediation.

So, how do you know if your GEO is working?

• Your share of search rises.
• Your share of buyer-intent traffic rises.
• Your prompt visibility expands across the CEPs that actually precede purchase.
• Your conversational queries convert at a higher rate.

Everything else is noise. 

Ignore the noise, fix the fundamentals, and remember the only mantra that matters in this brave, generative world:

• Be recommended by AI, when it matters and not when it doesn’t.

Dig deeper: SEO in the age of AI: Becoming the trusted answer