Three things, in order. It measures which prompts in your category name you, per engine, and which name a rival. It rebuilds the owned pages an engine would quote.

Then it earns mentions on the third-party sources those engines already cite. Most of a generated answer is assembled from sites that are not yours.

The order matters. Skipping the measurement step means you cannot tell a real gain from a model update three months later.

SEO earns a position on a results page a person scans. GEO earns a place in the small set of sources an engine retrieves before it writes an answer nobody scans.

The foundations overlap. Crawlability, authority and clear structure matter to both.

The unit of success is different. A ranking is a position. A citation is inclusion in a synthesis, and the engine chooses without showing its work.

In practice, barely. AEO names the discipline after the answer and GEO names it after the engines. The on-page work is nearly identical.

Where GEO earns its own name is the per-engine layer. Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode retrieve from different indexes and weight sources differently.

We report each engine separately so you can see which one moved, rather than hiding the difference inside one blended number.

Judge on four things rather than a published list. Does the agency show its own AI citation numbers, dated? Does it report each engine separately?

Does it measure share of voice against competitors you name? And does it say which of its tactics are proven versus reasoned?

We tore down eight ranking AEO and GEO agency landing pages. Not one used a comparison table, only one handled buyer objections in the open, two published pricing, and none named a practitioner.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews, each baselined and reported in its own column.

They are not equal. Google surfaces carry most measurable citation volume today. Perplexity matters for research-heavy buyers. ChatGPT citation data is thin in every index we can access.

We say which engines matter for your category after the baseline rather than promising all of them.

No, and neither can anyone else. Model updates change outputs with no change on your side.

What we commit to is method. A measured baseline before we start, a frozen prompt set you sign off, and monthly reporting against three named competitors.

If your coverage rises while theirs falls, that is the work. If everyone rises together, we tell you it was a model update.

It depends on where your gap is, and we know that after the baseline rather than before.

Extractability gaps, where engines can find your pages but cannot cleanly quote them, move in weeks. Retrieval-set gaps, where engines quote sources you are not on, move in months.

The second kind depends on third parties publishing, which no agency controls. We tell you which gap you have before you commit.

Yes, and this is where most GEO pitches are dishonest. A page an engine cannot crawl or render will never be retrieved, however well written it is.

Crawlability and authority are the floor. What changed is what you measure on top of them.

A rankings-only report shows green while pipeline softens, because the research moved into an answer box that report cannot see.

Partly, and we publish the caveat. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode did not appear in the citation index we use before roughly spring 2026.

Any growth figure spanning that boundary is partly measuring index coverage rather than performance. We disclose this on every page that carries a citation number.

Our own counts are re-pulled before every use and dated, because they move.