Need help with GEO

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Mostly your suspicion is right. Nobody outside the model vendors has real prompt volume, so these tools run a fixed set of prompts you choose across ChatGPT, Perplexity and the like on a schedule and report whether you got mentioned. That makes them a tracker, not an optimizer. What actually moves the answers is being on the pages the models pull from: your own pages stating plainly what you do and for whom, and third-party mentions like comparison lists, reviews and forum threads. I'd do that work first and only then pay for tracking, and in the meantime just run 20 buyer-style questions yourself once a month and log who gets named.

Lots of people currently ask to chatgpt instead of google or even of they ask google the first thing that comes up is AI answer. I have a file conversion product and last month I started doing geo using sseo(.)agency and now for the last couple of days I start getting clients from chat gpt and from gemini. My product is now used by AI's top 5 tools.

GEO tools don't work just use GSC GA4 Bing webmaster the native web tools with proper strategies

they are all scams. GEO, AEO or Ai Search prompt tracking is impossible. Not because I say so, but because that is the core of AI. What you can track is visits from teh different AI clients. I don't want to spam any page, so go to Google and search for "how to see ai traffic in ga4" and you'll get thousands of pages explaining how to do it, and it's free.

Pretty much spot on. Most GEO tools run a list of prompts through the model APIs on a schedule and report how often your brand shows up, and the "this prompt gets X searches" numbers are modelled or pulled from small panels.

Answers also vary a lot from run to run (SparkToro found the same prompt almost never returns the same brand list twice), which makes a single visibility score noisy. Check your server logs for OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot, and look at GA4 referrals from chatgpt etc, because if those bots can't crawl you nothing else matters.

Rather than focusing on tracking mentions, which as I mentioned is unreliable, I built Geograph to help work on the signals AI uses to select who to mention through Reddit replies, optimised article writing with backlinks from other members and website audits to ensure that crawlability and content written in a way AI likes.

If you're looking to get mentioned: the single most important thing is getting mentioned on the pages the models already cite for your category, often Reddit threads, but also review sites, comparison posts and YouTube.

Good for measuring visibility over time which is valuable for a primary set of buyer prompts, but you are right, other than looking at competitors and copying what they do, there isnt much value in terms of telling you what to do to improve. I built my own diagnostic tool to analyse a URL against a commercial query to help with optimising for these kinds of problems.

We can't fully control GEO results. AI-generated answers can change from one search to the next, and a business that appears in an answer today may not appear in the next one. The same applies when using AI visibility tools.

These results can still be useful signals, though, especially when the query genuinely matches the business. They help us understand how AI currently interprets and presents a business in a specific context, rather than guarantee future visibility.

In my view, maintaining accurate, consistent, and up-to-date business information across relevant platforms — aligned with the real business and structured so AI systems can find and use it — is a better foundation than optimizing for keywords alone.

There is one important exception: if a business genuinely serves a particular query but AI can't find or recognize it, that gap needs to be investigated urgently.

However, in highly competitive markets, entity optimization alone may not be enough. A business may also need stronger supporting sources, greater authority, and clearer evidence of relevance to stand out.

The goal isn't to force a particular AI answer every time. It's to make the business easier for AI to identify, understand, and confidently select when it's genuinely relevant.

crawlproof

You're right about the core limit. Nobody outside OpenAI or Google has real prompt logs, so every GEO tool runs a set of prompts on a schedule. That doesn't make them useless, it just means the prompts decide whether the data means anything.

What I'd check before trusting one:

- Where the prompts come from. If they're the questions your buyers actually ask (sales calls, support tickets, Search Console queries, threads like this one), running them repeatedly is a fair proxy. If the tool generates generic prompts for you, the score is mostly noise.
- How often each prompt runs. Answers change between runs and between engines, so one check per prompt tells you very little. Look for daily history on the same question.
- Whether it separates cited, mentioned and recommended. Your page can be a source while a competitor's product is the one recommended. A single "visibility %" hides that.
- Whether it shows the full answer and the sources, not just a number. That's where you see which facts are missing or wrong.

And the tool itself doesn't optimize anything. What moves answers is still the facts on your own pages and listings (specs, who it's for, price, how it compares) and what review sites and videos say about you.

Full disclosure, I'm building a tool around exactly these checks, so I won't name it here since this isn't the place for ads. Happy to share more by DM if it's useful.