Skip to content

Reference

Every question, answered once and published openly

41 answers covering measurement, capabilities, commercials and definitions — including the questions vendors usually deflect. Each one is also emitted as FAQPage structured data, so the version an answer engine quotes is the version you read here.

  • 41 answers
  • 6 topic groups
  • FAQPage structured data
  • Limits stated alongside capabilities

The short version

Four answers that cover most of it

If you read nothing else on this page, read these. Each is written to stand alone without the surrounding context.

What is AI search visibility?
Whether conversational AI engines name and recommend your brand when buyers ask category questions. The engines return a shortlist rather than a page of links, so an omitted brand is excluded from the evaluation entirely.
Which engines are tracked?
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode. Two of the six are Google Search experiences that share one crawler, so they are reported separately but never presented as independent model providers.
How often does it update?
On a weekly cycle aligned to ISO weeks, with 60 checks per brand per cycle. Run generation, extraction, scoring and drift detection are automated; this is drift detection rather than live monitoring.
What does it cost?
Software Intelligence is $149 per month and includes the full platform. Managed GEO Sprint is $2,500–$3,500 per month and adds an engineer who implements all five remediation tiers.

Asked less often, answered anyway

What the platform does not do

These boundaries are published on the product pages too. They are repeated here because they are the answers most likely to be missing from a summary written by someone who only skimmed the hero.

  • Engine answers are collected on a weekly cycle, not continuously

    Run generation, extraction, scoring, drift detection and remediation drafting are automated. Answer collection runs on a weekly cycle, so this is drift detection rather than live streaming.

  • The forecast is a model, not a measurement

    Missed-shortlist estimates use 4–10 monthly buyer evaluations per tracked decision-stage query. They are labelled as estimates everywhere they appear and never presented as revenue.

  • Stance and sentiment are extracted, not human-verified

    They are produced by a structured extraction pass and can be corrected by you at any time from the prompt matrix — which immediately recomputes the affected snapshot.

  • Outreach assets are drafts you publish

    Community and editorial drafts are generated for review. Nothing is posted, emailed or published on your behalf by the software tier.

01 · 8 answers

Getting started

What the product is, who it is for, and what happens in the first week.

What is AI search visibility, and why does it matter now?

AI search visibility is whether conversational engines name your brand when a buyer asks for a recommendation. Instead of ten blue links, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI surfaces return a two-to-three option shortlist. If you are not in it, no click, no impression and no analytics event records the loss — the buyer simply never learns you exist.

How does GEO measure it?

Each brand tracks ten grounded buyer-intent prompts across six AI surfaces, producing sixty checks per weekly cycle. Every check yields a recommendation stance, a sentiment, a position and a citation list. Visibility is position-weighted and stance-weighted, then normalised to a 0–100 score so it is directly comparable week over week.

What happens during onboarding?

A bounded parallel crawl reads your homepage, pricing page, features or documentation and llms.txt, plus the same pages on each competitor, under a hard latency ceiling. That grounding produces ten realistic buyer prompts across awareness, consideration and decision stages, and opens sixty checks across six surfaces.

How long until the first useful reading?

The first snapshot exists as soon as the first cycle of answers has been extracted and scored, so you see real stance and citation data from week one. Trend, drift detection and measured lift need a second complete week, because a delta requires a prior point to compare against.

What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?

SEO optimises for a ranked list of links. AEO optimises to be the extracted answer. GEO optimises to be the source a generative engine reasons over and cites. The same foundations serve all three, but AEO and GEO weight structure, crawler access, entity clarity and third-party corroboration far more heavily than keyword density.

Does the platform query the AI engines automatically?

Run generation, response extraction, scoring, drift detection and remediation drafting are automated. Answer collection runs on a weekly cycle rather than continuously, so this is drift detection — not live monitoring, and not a real-time alerting system.

What do you actually do about a bad result?

Every gap becomes a ranked asset with an effort badge, ranked by time to value: a five-minute objection-buster answer, an llms.txt file, entity disambiguation schema, a versus blueprint, then citation authority outreach. Each one ships with draft copy you can paste or hand to our engineers.

Can our own agents and tools read the data?

Yes. The platform exposes a Model Context Protocol server at /api/mcp with six brand-scoped tools covering citation reports, prompts, sources and the action queue, authenticated with per-brand bearer tokens so an engineering agent can pull visibility data into your own workflows.

02 · 5 answers

Measurement and methodology

The scoring model, the correction loop, and why two numbers are reported instead of one.

How is the visibility score calculated?

Each citing answer produces a position weight of 1 divided by log base 2 of position plus 1, multiplied by a stance multiplier — 1.25 for first choice, 1.0 for recommended, 0.75 for alternative, 0.5 for mentioned only and 0 for cautioned against. The sum is normalised against tracked prompts times six surfaces times 1.25, and capped at 100.

What is the difference between visibility score and citation share?

Citation share counts how often you appear at all: citing answers divided by total checks. Visibility score additionally weights where you appeared and how favourably. A brand can hold high citation share with low visibility if it is only ever mentioned in passing, which is why the platform reports both.

How quickly is a citation change reflected?

Immediately. Correcting or flagging a citation from the prompt matrix atomically recomputes the affected weekly snapshot, and the next processed response for that prompt and surface updates the score in the same pass. Dashboard reads invalidate on that write rather than on a timer.

Which engines are covered, and what about the two Google surfaces?

Six surfaces are tracked: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. AI Overviews and AI Mode are two distinct Google Search experiences that share Googlebot, so the platform reports them separately while making clear they are not independent model providers.

Can we track prompts we choose ourselves?

Yes. Onboarding generates ten grounded prompts from a crawl of your site and your competitors, and you can add, edit, deactivate or restore prompts at any time. Newly tracked prompts are backfilled into the current cycle so they begin reporting within the same week.

03 · 5 answers

Features and capabilities

The audit criteria, the drift signals, the remediation tiers and the machine access layer.

What checks does the AI Health Check run?

Four areas scored out of 100: crawler access for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended worth 25 points; llms.txt and llms-full.txt worth 15; Schema.org coverage worth 35 including Organization, sameAs, Product, transparent offers and FAQPage; and semantic structure worth 25 for headings, tables, text density and landmarks.

What is an AI defamation or hallucination alert?

Five drift signals are detected: a cautioned-against stance, negative sentiment, a stance drop from first choice or recommended to alternative or mentioned-only, a competitor taking first choice on a decision-stage query, and a weighted visibility fall of five points or more between two complete weeks.

What is in a Factual Correction Kit?

Five deliverables generated from the detected incident: the cleaned objection, a forty-five-word refutation that opens by naming the claim as inaccurate, a FAQPage JSON-LD block, a verified-facts section you can append to llms.txt, and a five-step remediation plan ending in re-running the weekly cycle.

Does the platform invent pricing or review numbers?

No. Asset generation is bound by a no-fabrication rule: facts come only from observed crawl and citation data, and anything unverified is emitted as an explicit placeholder marker for you to complete. There is a verification script that fails the build if a zero-price offer template or a missing placeholder marker appears.

Is the missed-shortlist forecast a measurement?

No — it is a model, and it is labelled as one. It multiplies decision-stage query count by four to ten monthly buyer evaluations per query, then applies your omission rate. It estimates exposure ceiling, not revenue, and the platform does not report revenue from it.

04 · 5 answers

Pricing and engagement

What each plan includes, what is guaranteed, and what cancellation looks like.

What is the difference between the two plans?

Software Intelligence at $149 per month gives your team the full platform and the ranked queue of draft assets to implement. The Managed GEO Sprint at $2,500 to $3,500 per month adds an engineer who implements all five tiers, seeds citation authority and reports to your board.

Is there a free trial?

Every engagement opens with fourteen days of full platform access. You complete onboarding, get a real first-cycle reading and see the forensic reason competitors are being chosen before you commit to anything.

Do you guarantee a score increase?

No, and any vendor who does is guessing. AI surface answers are not a system you control. What is guaranteed is measurement: every completed action gets a locked baseline and a measured after-value on the following cycle, so you see exactly what moved and what did not.

What does cancellation look like?

Monthly, with data export at any time. You can export CSV, JSON, a print-ready executive PDF, and your full action history. Your citations, sources and snapshots remain yours to take with you.

Why is the managed tier priced like an agency retainer?

Because it is engineering work: schema injection, llms.txt production, comparison page copywriting and citation outreach executed by the same team that built the measurement. The software tier is the instrument; the sprint tier is the crew that acts on its output.

05 · 4 answers

Definitions and debates

The arguments worth having about GEO, AEO and llms.txt.

Is GEO just a rebranded version of SEO?

No, though they share foundations. SEO competes for rank in a list a human scans. GEO competes to be the source a model retrieves, reasons over and cites inside a synthesised answer. Entity clarity, crawler permissions, machine-readable structure and third-party corroboration carry far more weight in GEO than link ranking does.

Does llms.txt actually affect AI visibility?

It is a proposed convention rather than a ratified standard, and no major provider has committed to it publicly. It costs almost nothing to publish and it makes your hierarchy explicit for any agent that reads it, so the expected value favours publishing it — but treat it as a low-cost signal, not a guaranteed ranking factor.

What is a citation stance and why weight it?

Stance describes how an engine framed you: first choice, recommended, alternative, mentioned only, or cautioned against. A mention is not a win — being listed fourth as a fallback is materially different from being named as the primary recommendation, so the score multiplies positional weight by stance weight.

What is citation drift?

Drift is the change in how engines describe you between cycles. Models are re-indexed and re-trained continuously, and competitor content and third-party sources shift underneath you. A brand can lose a first-choice position without any change of its own, which is why week-over-week comparison matters more than any single reading.

06 · 3 answers

The practice behind the product

Who operates the platform, how claims are verified, and how the limits are enforced.

How do you avoid overstating what the platform does?

By publishing the boundaries. The platform states that answers are collected on a weekly cycle rather than live, that the forecast is a model rather than a measurement, that stance and sentiment are extracted rather than human-verified, and that outreach assets are drafts you publish. Every limitation is on the site, not in a footnote.

Where does the example data on this site come from?

The visuals on the marketing pages are labelled illustrative in place. The scoring formulas, thresholds, tier ranking, audit point allocation and plan structure shown are the literal values the product uses, taken from the implementation rather than from marketing estimates.

Who is behind GEO?

GEO is the AI search visibility practice of For Your Reach. It builds and operates the tracking platform and delivers the managed implementation sprints, which is why the people who write the schema are the same people who built the measurement that proves it worked.

07 · 4 answers

Comparisons and alternatives

How GEO differs from monitoring tools and when each alternative wins.

Are these comparisons neutral?

They are structured to be checkable: our capabilities reference the shipped implementation — sixty checks per cycle, five stances, five drift signals, five remediation tiers and six MCP tools — while competitor capabilities describe public positioning as of September 2026. Prices change, so every competitor price says to check the vendor.

When should I pick the competitor instead?

Every comparison names it plainly: pick Otterly for the cheapest first read, Profound for enterprise compliance, Peec AI for many locales, Writesonic for draft volume, Semrush for an entrenched keyword workflow, Geoptie for a capped starter. Pick GEO when you need the reason behind every loss plus the drafted fix.

How hard is migration?

Export prompts as CSV, map categories to commercial, informational, transactional or branded, re-ground ten per brand across awareness, consideration and decision stages, and baseline-lock on import week so the first delta is honest. Newly tracked prompts backfill into the current cycle.

Do you guarantee a better score after switching?

No, and any vendor who does is guessing. AI surface answers are not a system you control. What is guaranteed is measurement: every completed action gets a locked baseline and a measured after-value on the following cycle, so you see exactly what moved and what did not.

08 · 7 answers

Engines and integrations

The six surfaces tracked and how your own agents read the same numbers.

Do you query the AI engines automatically?

Run generation, response extraction, scoring, drift detection and remediation drafting are automated. Answer collection runs on a weekly cycle rather than continuously, so this is drift detection — not live monitoring, and not a real-time alerting system.

Why track six surfaces instead of one?

Each assistant reads different sources and answers in its own way. A brand can be the top pick in one and absent in another on the same afternoon. Ten prompts across six surfaces produce sixty checks per cycle, which is what makes week-over-week comparison meaningful.

Are Google AI Overviews and AI Mode different providers?

No. They are two distinct Google Search experiences that share Googlebot, so the platform reports them separately while making clear they are not independent model providers.

What actually moves an engine answer?

Retrieval access first, then entity clarity, machine-readable structure and third-party corroboration. The audit scores crawler access, llms.txt, Schema.org and semantic structure out of one hundred, and the remediation queue fires only when your own data calls for it.

What can our agents read through MCP?

Six brand-scoped tools over Streamable HTTP at /api/mcp: citation reports, prompts with stance per engine, sources with opportunities, the pending action queue, plus mark-done and dismiss. Authentication is a per-brand bearer token, SHA-256 hashed at rest, at sixty requests per minute per token.

Which clients work with the MCP server?

Any Streamable HTTP client: Cursor, Claude Desktop, Windsurf, VS Code agents and your own scripts. Create a token in MCP Access settings, paste it into the client config, and ask what changed this week — the numbers match the dashboard exactly.

Is MCP access read-only?

Mostly reads, with two scoped writes: marking an action done locks the current snapshot as its baseline, and dismissing removes it from the queue. Both are brand-isolated — a token can never see another brand.

Still deciding?

Find out what you're losing before next Monday

Fourteen days of full access, your real recommendation record, and the exact reason competitors are being chosen on your own queries. Every week you wait is a week of answers going out without you. No call required.