The Gumshoe Playbook
How to Measure and Improve Your AI Visibility
If you're not sure what Generative Engine Optimization is, check What is GEO first. If you understand GEO and are ready to take action for your clients, this is the full playbook for you.
Establish Your Baseline
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 audits are specific: one product line, one geography, one buyer situation. Combining multiple focus areas in a single audit 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 audit for each.
Identify your personas. Personas are the heart of a Gumshoe audit. 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 audit 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 audit 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 audit. 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.
Read Your Results
Your audit 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 audit. 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 audit.
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.
Find Your Gaps
Your audit 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 audit 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 Citations 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.
Take Action
Here is what to do with your gap analysis: the four pillars of the playbook, worked in order. Fix the upstream ones first so the rest can land.
Technical Audit
AI models need to be able to reach and read your site. Gumshoe's Technical Audit surfaces issues that prevent LLMs from crawling your website page by page, from missing schema to slow load times to broken redirects. Fix these first so the rest of your work can land.
Content Audit
Once models can read your site, give them something worth quoting. Use Gumshoe's Content Audit to spot the topics and personas your site does not yet cover, then publish clear, factual content that directly answers your ideal buyers' questions. This is where the biggest gains usually come from, and they often show up in weeks.
Citation Audit
AI models read the sites that talk about you, not just your own site. Use the Citations view to see exactly where your competitors are cited and you are not. Find opportunities for partnerships, advertorials, and other ways to be seen where the models already are.
Sentiment Audit
AI does not just decide whether to mention you, it decides how. Gumshoe's Sentiment Audit reads sentiment and recommendation strength by persona, topic, and model, so you know which claims to counter and where to correct the record.
See What's Working. And Repeat!
GEO is a cycle, not a one-time project. Your audits are the feedback loop that tells you whether your technical fixes, content work, and third-party outreach are actually moving the needle.
Run your audits 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 audit 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.
The 4 Gumshoe Pillars
Built on your client's personas and prompts. Start with the AI Visibility Audit to see where they stand, then work the four pillars you just read through, from one question to the next.
AI Visibility Audit
See where the client stands per persona × topic × model.
Everything is measured per persona × topic × AI model. Re-run over time to track the trend.
Quick-Start Checklist
Define 3-5 buyer personas with specific roles, industries, and evaluation criteria
Run your first AI visibility audit across at least 3 models
Identify your top 3 gaps using the priority matrix (high-value persona + low visibility)
Review citation sources to find where competitors are cited and you are not
Take action: optimize one key page, create one citation-worthy asset, update one third-party listing
Schedule monthly monitoring to measure the impact and track competitive shifts
The full Gumshoe Playbook is only available on Pro
The AI Visibility Audit shows you the score. The four audits that execute the playbook, Content, Sentiment, Citation, and Technical, come with the Pro plan.
See the Gumshoe Playbook in ActionWant to understand how the data is collected?
Our methodology page explains how we access the AI models directly, how persona-driven testing works, and how we handle the fact that AI answers vary every time.
Read Our MethodologyRun your first AI visibility audit
See how AI models describe your brand across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and more. Your first audit is free.
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