GEO measurement method: a fixed panel of queries, with controls
What is measured
A fixed panel: the queries your customers would type into ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, always the same ones and in the same words. Each round records whether you appear, in what position, and which source the engine cites when it names you.
It is repeated over time. The data point is not one answer, it is the series: how many times you appear out of how many, round after round.
Why one run is not enough
Because answers change on their own. Ask an answer engine the same question twice and roughly six out of ten cited sources change between one run and the next with nothing touched (Schulte, Bleeker & Kaufmann, 2026). A screenshot from one day is a snapshot, not a measurement. The details are in the experiments.
The control: check the instrument can see before counting
Every round starts with a control question whose answer we already know. If the engine cannot find what we know exists, that round counts no hits: it is only used to see which sources the engine relies on.
And it is never measured from the account of the person being measured. An assistant can draw on the asker's history, and then the "hit" is personalisation, not visibility. I checked it by measuring myself: hits that showed up inside my own account disappeared when signed out. That is why rounds are run in conversations that do not use history, or signed out, and each one records its condition.
What is published
My own measurements, with date, instrument and command, are in the public ledger. The technical readability tests are reproducible recipes, open source on GitHub, with a dataset and a DOI: the cookbook. And the citability inspector publishes its rules and its version.
What is never promised
That an engine will cite you. Each engine decides, and it changes from day to day. What is delivered is that nothing on your side is broken, false or hidden, and the series measured before and after.
How it applies to your brand
It starts with the free GEO audit, which is a snapshot of today. If we carry on, the panel becomes the monthly monitoring in the services.