GEO 101: How to Measure and Improve Your AI Visibility

Before you can improve anything, you need to know where you stand. That means running your first Gumshoe visibility audit.

Set your focus. The most useful reports are specific: one product line, one geography, one buyer situation. Combining multiple focus areas in a single report muddies the data and makes it harder to act on what you learn. If you serve enterprise and SMB, or operate across multiple regions, run a separate report for each.

Identify your personas. Personas are the heart of a Gumshoe report. They shape every prompt, every answer, and every insight you will act on. Gumshoe generates them for you based on your brand and category, grounded in real buyer situations rather than broad labels like "small business owner." Your job is to review them, confirm they reflect your actual buyers, and edit any that do not fit.

Define your prompts. Prompts are the questions your buyer personas actually bring to AI models. Gumshoe generates realistic prompts based on the pertinent topics and the personas you have defined, so the report mirrors real buyer behavior. Review them before running if you want to tighten the fit to your category.

Pick your models. Start with the models your buyers actually use. At minimum: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity. Add Claude, DeepSeek, and Grok for a more complete picture.

Set a schedule. AI answers shift over time as models update and your category moves. Schedule your report to re-run on a regular cadence (weekly or monthly) so you can track your visibility and see whether your actions are moving the needle.

Run the report. Gumshoe runs your prompts across your selected models and personas. The result is a full picture of your visibility built from hundreds of conversations (persona prompts paired with AI model answers), not a single snapshot.

Your report comes back with a lot of data to explore. Here are a few of the most useful places to start.

Overall visibility score. The percentage of AI conversations where your brand was mentioned across your whole report. This is your headline number and the one you will watch most closely over time.

Persona visibility score. This is where the real insights live. The same brand can show up 60 percent of the time for one persona and 5 percent for another. You might be well known to enterprise buyers but invisible to small business owners, or vice versa. These gaps are the most actionable data in your report.

Competitive leaderboard. Your competitive map in AI search. Who appears most often in your category? Who gets recommended first? Who is gaining ground and who is slipping? This shows you exactly who you are fighting for visibility against, which is often not the same list as your traditional competitive set.

Conversations. The actual AI responses behind your scores. You can read the exact answers the models gave for every prompt, see which brands were mentioned, and watch how your brand is described in context. Numbers tell you what is happening. Conversations tell you why.

Sources and citations. The sites AI models pull from when they answer questions in your category: reviews, forums, publications, documentation, and creator content. This is where diagnosis turns into action. If your competitors are mentioned on sources you are not, that is a concrete list of places to go work your way into.

The above will get you started, but there is so much more to dig into. Check out the Gumshoe Help Center for deeper dives into Gumshoe's extensive features.

Your report gives you several ways to spot where to focus. A few of the most useful:

Low-visibility personas. The persona view is often the fastest path to action. The same brand can show up 60 percent of the time for one persona and 5 percent for another. Start with your highest-value personas where visibility is weakest. Those are your biggest missed opportunities.

Heatmaps. The persona and topic heatmaps on your report dashboard show exactly where you are strong and where you are invisible across every combination.

Competitors within reach. The competitive leaderboard shows who you are actually fighting for visibility in AI answers, which is often a different list than your traditional competitive set. Look past the category leaders and focus on the competitors just ahead of you. Those are the ones you can realistically close on.

Buyer criteria analysis. The radar graphs show how AI describes your brand versus competitors across the specific buying factors in your category. When a competitor's shape extends into territory that yours does not, you have a clear content direction: expand the map in that direction.

Citation gaps. Open the Sources view and look at which sites AI cites when it recommends your competitors. See how often your own website is cited, and look for third-party partnership opportunities.

Here is what to do with your gap analysis. Three levers, in priority order.

GEO is a cycle, not a one-time project. Your report is the feedback loop that tells you whether your technical fixes, content work, and third-party outreach are actually moving the needle.

Run your reports on a schedule that matches your pace of change. Most brands land somewhere between weekly and monthly. Weekly is the right cadence when you are actively publishing, pushing new pages live, or chasing citations, because you get a quick read on what is working. Monthly works once your foundation is stable and you are watching trends. You can run the same report as often as you want. The Trends view stitches it all together.

Watch what your competitors are doing. Your visibility does not live in isolation. A competitor climbing on the competitive leaderboard or in their citation rate changes your position even if your own numbers hold. Catching that early lets you respond before the gap widens.

Go deeper as you grow. The early wins usually come from the obvious gaps. Once those are closed, the work gets more precise. Which topics still underperform? Which models are harder to crack? Which product features do LLMs most associate with you? The questions get sharper, and so do the answers.