Tracking GEO Performance

Before diving into how to tell if you’re cited, let’s clarify two flavors of GEO metrics:

• Citation Presence (Are you cited at all?): Essentially, are AI answers including your content? This is a binary and quantitative concern – first whether you’re cited, and second how often.
• AI Share of Voice (How much space of the content do your brand get?): If you are cited, how prominently and extensively is your content used in the answer? Researchers measure this with things like Word Count, Position-Adjusted Word Count, and Subjective Impression – fancy ways to gauge how much of your text appears and how influential it is in the AI’s response.

How to Tell if You’re Being Cited by AI: Key Metrics & Methods

Tracking AI citations is still an emerging science, but here are the main metrics and approaches (for major generative engines like ChatGPT, Google’s SGE, Perplexity, Claude, and others) marketers are using:

1. Citation Presence – “Am I cited at all, and how often?”

This is a straightforward metric: how many times does your content or domain get referenced by an AI engine over a given set of queries or time period. It’s akin to counting backlinks in SEO, but here we’re counting AI-attributed mentions. An industry term for this is AI citation count, defined as the “total references to your content across LLMs” . For example, if over a month ChatGPT (with browsing) cited your blog 5 times and SGE cited it 3 times, your total AI citation count is 8 for that period.

Closely related is Attribution Rate (or Reference Rate): the percentage of AI answers that include your brand/content when it could have been cited. Think of it this way – for all the relevant queries where your content should be considered, how often does it actually get the nod? This metric asks: “Out of 100 AI answers about topics I cover, in how many did I appear?” It’s essentially how frequently you show up as a source. Search Engine Land calls this “attribution rate in AI outputs” – “how often your brand/site is cited in AI answers” . A high attribution rate means the AI reliably pulls you in; a low rate means you’re usually absent.

To track these, you can manually tally appearances (more on that in a bit), or use emerging GEO tools. Some enterprise tools now log each time your domain appears in AI results. For instance, Semrush’s Geo Tracker and others are adding “AI visibility” reports that show citation counts. In fact, Semrush’s GEO toolkit can show visibility metrics for your domain in generative search results, even comparing which competitors get cited by ChatGPT for the same keywords . Another example: Peec AI (a GEO monitoring tool) displays “how often your content appears in ChatGPT answers” right on its dashboard . These tools essentially automate counting citations across platforms.

If you prefer a DIY approach: pick a set of important questions in your niche and periodically ask the AI engines. Note how often you pop up. This can be tedious (and it’s impossible to monitor everything), but it gives a rough idea of your citation frequency. One pro tip is to use varied phrasings of a question to see if you ever appear. If 0 out of 10 related questions include you, that’s a sign you’re not making the cut.

2. AI Share of Voice – “How much space of the content do your brand get?”

Share of Voice (SoV) is a concept borrowed from PR/branding, and in the AI context it measures the proportion of times your brand is mentioned or cited relative to others. If five sources are cited across 20 AI answers, and you’re cited in 5 of those, you have 25% share of voice for that topic. Marketers love this because it puts your presence in competitive context: are you dominating AI mentions, or is a rival the favored child of the algorithms?

AI Share of Voice can be weighted by prominence. For example, being the first source listed might be given more weight than being the fifth. One agency describes a weighting system (1st position = 1.0, 2nd = 0.5, 3rd = 0.33, etc.) to score your presence . But even a simple unweighted SoV (%) is useful. It basically answers: of all brand mentions/citations in this AI domain, how big is my slice?

This metric is a bit trickier to calculate manually, because you need to capture all the sources being cited for a range of queries. Some GEO tools attempt this: for example, AthenaHQ boasts a “360° view” across AI platforms, scanning ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, SGE, etc., to see where and how your brand appears . It tracks “which queries mention you [and] which answers cite your content”, essentially building an AI share-of-voice profile for you . The goal is to quantify your visibility against competitors. If AthenaHQ shows your SoV for “AI marketing tools” queries is, say, 10% while Competitor X has 30%, you know who’s the bigger blip on the AI’s radar.

3. Brand Mention Frequency (BMF) – “Is my name (or URL) showing up, even without a link?”

Not all AI citations are clickable links. ChatGPT and Claude often will use information from sources without explicitly saying “according to Example.com” (unless prompted or in certain modes). However, sometimes your brand or product name might be mentioned in the AI’s answer text, which is a form of citation too (just not a formal one). For instance, ChatGPT might answer, “Many SEOs are turning to tools like YourBrand SEO for AI optimization,” even if it didn’t hyperlink to you. That’s still a win – you were named.

Brand mention frequency tracks how often your brand or domain name appears in AI outputs. This is similar to citation count, but it also counts non-linked mentions (and is agnostic to whether your content was used verbatim or just referred to). It’s worth tracking because some AI platforms (like certain chat modes of ChatGPT or voice assistants) might relay your ideas without a formal citation. If your brand is unique enough (e.g., a distinct company name), you can monitor this by searching transcripts or using tools that scan AI answers for keywords.

In fact, some GEO software focuses on exactly this: Profound (an enterprise GEO platform) has analytics that “track how often your brand and products are mentioned in AI-generated answers”, even analyzing the context of those mentions . The idea is to catch references to you, with or without direct links.

Why care? Because a mention still puts your brand in the user’s mind. It’s like a word-of-mouth referral by the AI. Over time, frequent mentions can lead to users doing their own searches for your brand or trusting your brand as authoritative (e.g., “ChatGPT keeps mentioning Acme Corp’s study on this topic, so Acme must be legit”). Also, tracking mentions can highlight if AI is favoring describing a competitor’s solution by name while glossing over yours.

Tools to Measure Performance

AthenaHQ – A dedicated GEO platform, that continually scans multiple AI engines. Its key output: a dashboard of queries where you appear vs. don’t. Essentially, it produces metrics like Citation Rate per platform and flags “missed opportunities” (queries where similar content was cited but not yours) . If you want an all-in-one view of “am I cited at all across the AI world?”, this kind of tool is aiming to provide that, with both numbers and specific examples.

Semrush (AI Toolkit) – Integrates AI visibility into their SEO suite. It shows AI Share of Voice (how your presence compares to others) and which pages of yours are getting cited where .

Manually testing (AI Citation Audits)

Until tools mature, a lot of marketers are doing good old manual checks to see if they’re cited . Here’s a quick methodology (which doubles as a metric-gathering exercise):

• Identify important queries your target audience might ask AI. Think of the questions you wish your content would answer (the same ones you target in SEO).
• For each query, use multiple AI engines (ChatGPT, SGE, Perplexity, Claude, Bing, etc.) to get answers.
• Document whether your content is cited or mentioned. You can set up a spreadsheet with columns like: Query, Platform, Cited Y/N, Position of citation (if any), Other sources cited. This yields both a raw count and a ratio of queries where you appear.
• This gives you a Citation Presence Score per platform – e.g., “In 10 sample questions on Perplexity, we appeared 2 times (20%). On SGE, 3 out of 10 (30%). On ChatGPT, 0 out of 10 (0%).” Those percentages are essentially your attribution rates for those samples, and the counts are citation counts. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a useful yardstick.
• Repeat this periodically (say, monthly) to see if you’re gaining or losing visibility in AI answers. If you do some GEO optimizations (like adding schema, reworking content for clarity, etc.), see if these numbers improve over time – that’s your feedback loop.

Some marketers treat this like ranking checks in SEO – except it’s checking “citation rankings.” If you find, for example, that competitors are consistently cited instead of you for certain questions, you now have intelligence to act on. Maybe their content is more succinct or contains data that yours doesn’t – time to beef up your page. As one guide put it: “If your competitor’s insights show up in that answer and yours don’t, they’ve taken the lead… You weren’t even in the room.” Use that FOMO as fuel to optimize.

References

1. AnnieLaurie Walters – “Want to Show Up in AI Search Results? Start Tracking This Overlooked SEO Metric”, Wayfind Marketing (July 2025) .
2. Duane Forrester – “12 new KPIs for the generative AI search era”, Search Engine Land (June 2025) .
3. Allisa Boulette – “Generative engine optimization (GEO): How to outrank competitors in AI search”, Zapier Blog (July 2025) .
4. Phil Nottingham – “The Rise of GEO – How AI is Transforming SEO”, WPShout (2024) .
5. Jackie Nguyen – “What is GEO? An In-Depth Explanation of Generative Engine Optimization”, Manhattan Strategies (June 2025) .
6. Ross Simmonds – “11 Best Generative Engine Optimization Tools for 2025”, Foundation Inc (July 2025) .
7. Margarita Loktionova – “The 9 Best Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Tools of 2025”, Semrush Blog (July 2025) .