You’ve probably heard of SEO. But have you heard of GEO?
Generative Engine Optimization is about whether AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude actually mention your brand when someone asks a relevant question.
When a potential customer asks an LLM “What are the best tools to track my brand’s AI visibility?”, does your company show up in the answer? If not, you’re basically invisible in what’s quickly becoming the primary discovery channel for many buyers.
There’s already a growing industry around this. Companies like Profound, Otterly AI, Peec AI, and Athena HQ are building dedicated GEO analytics platforms. But the underlying methodology isn’t that complicated. You can set up your own tracking system with a simple workflow.
How It Works
I built a workflow in Needle that runs in four steps:
1. Index your competitors. Take the landing pages of 5 to 10 companies in your space and add them to a Needle collection using a web connector. This gives the system context about what these companies actually do and claim.
2. Extract keywords and generate prompts. An AI agent reads through all the indexed pages, pulls out the key SEO and GEO-relevant terms, and generates 25 high-intent prompts. The kind of questions a real user would type into ChatGPT or Gemini:
“What are the top AI search monitoring tools in 2026?”
“Which platforms help brands track their visibility in generative AI engines?”
“Recommend tools that analyze how competitors rank in AI assistants vs traditional SERPs.”
3. Ask the LLM. Each prompt gets sent to an LLM (in this case Gemini with search enabled). The model answers each one and we capture which brands it mentions.
4. Score and visualize. The results get written to a Google Sheet and rendered as an HTML dashboard. You get a competitive heatmap showing who’s getting mentioned, how often, and for which types of queries.
What You Actually Learn
When I ran this on 5 GEO analytics companies, the results were immediately actionable:
Profound dominated with 9 mentions across 25 prompts
Otterly AI performed well with 7 mentions
Peec AI showed up in 5
Two companies significantly underperformed
28% of prompts returned zero brand mentions, which is a real opportunity gap
The dashboard breaks it all down. Mention counts per brand, which prompts triggered which mentions, and a heatmap showing coverage across all 25 queries.
You can schedule this to run daily. Over time you build a time series of your GEO score, tracking whether your AI visibility is improving or declining relative to competitors.
Why This Matters
SEO took 20 years to mature. GEO is just getting started. The companies that figure out how to consistently show up in AI-generated answers will have a serious distribution advantage, especially as more users skip Google entirely and go straight to an LLM.
The workflow template is available in Needle. Index your competitors’ landing pages, connect a Google Sheet, and run it. If you want to see the full walkthrough, check out the video on our YouTube channel.
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