Ep 5.4: How to Show Your Boss Your GEO Strategy Is Working

In our last episode, you know the one where you saw this face for the first time, we talked about how AI metrics are a bit, shall we say, funny? Or, to be slightly more descriptive, built on educated guesses and proprietary technology that different AI tools use to show things like share of voice and mention rate.

Since the world has gone absolutely bonkers about getting those AI metrics up, we’ve had to continually remind our clients that GEO is still in its infancy and that, despite there being some differences in the approach, SEO remains the most worthwhile channel for your marketing budget.

There’s just one problem though: No one really believes us.

It’s like during the pandemic when all the slightly less panicked folk were like, “dude, literally no one is coming after your toilet paper.” Did that stop anyone from spending their life’s savings on Andrex 3‑ply? No, because those silly billies still stocked up like they were about to lock themselves in a panic room for three months with nothing but puddle water and spicy Mexican food to tide them over.

To be fair though, hype is hype, and FOMO is FOMO, and we totally get why marketing managers are under so much pressure to get and, more importantly, prove AI visibility results to higher‑ups who have the gravitas and corner‑office chops to say stuff like, “Just get it done,” and expect marketing teams to do exactly that.

And because everyone’s in a tizzy to get ahead of this thing, the marketing executives we talk to are under an immense amount of pressure to show some kind of proof that the company has made the right investment not only in their digital marketing agency but also in themselves for staying on top of it.

Basically, leadership wants to see a very beautiful graph with a big arrow pointing upwards and you, yes, you, need a roadmap for making it happen.

So in this episode, we’ll look at how to build the strategy for collecting those juicy numbers that show your efforts are moving the needle. Because even if the data is still less than concrete, the real goal is to turn those signals into a story that feels structured, credible, and important to your brand.

First up, let’s put some stakes in the ground. We need to benchmark your visibility against your biggest competitors, so I guess the prequel to step one would be to know who that is.

For the most accurate results, you want to track your progress against at least three of your competitors over time, so make sure you’re choosing the most appropriate ones. For example, just because you sell really groovy sandals, there’s no way you’re competing against Birkenstock unless you have the marketing budget to destroy their decades of solid PR.

Basically, it’s the same philosophy behind SEO. Don’t be too aspirational here unless, of course, you like to make life more difficult for yourself.

If your goal is to benchmark your visibility against similar brands, your first step is to build a list of prompts, the building blocks of GEO, if you will.

At this point, I do recommend using AI visibility tools like GeekyIQ, but I did promise myself I’d keep my GeekyIQ plugs to an absolute minimum. GeekyIQ.

There are a few ways to build your list of prompts. You can use AI visibility tools like GeekyIQ or even ask your favourite AI tool to help you generate them. Maybe I’ll include an example prompt in the show notes that you could feed to your AI tool to help you build that list.

Aim for thirty prompts, but if you really get stumped after prompt number fourteen, try not to sweat it too much.

For a balanced approach, your list should include a mixture of branded and unbranded prompts, and the prompts themselves should be varied to represent the full spectrum of buyer intent.

For example:

A branded prompt would be, “Who is this Genny from Geeky Tech?” “Who’s asking?”

An informational‑intent category prompt would be, “What’s the difference between SEO and GEO, and should I be doing both?”

And a commercial‑intent category prompt would be something like, “Who are the top GEO‑aware SEO agencies in the UK that can help my team build a better marketing strategy?”

Once you have your list of prompts, the next step is to run them across the big‑name AI search engines like ChatGPT and Google AI Overview.

Now, in my honest opinion, it makes more sense to run these prompts across all major LLMs because even though, for example, Google AI Overview and Gemini are both Google products, they’re still going to spit out different answers. So besides running your prompts in ChatGPT and Google AI Overview, try to run them across Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini as well.

Use your AI visibility tools like GeekyIQ to see where you show up, how you show up, and which platforms are biased towards particular competitors for different types of prompts. Use those AI metrics I talked about in the last episode to finally establish a baseline, even if some of those metrics need to be taken with a grain of salt. Which one are we talking about again?

Share of Voice, or how often your brand is mentioned, recommended, or cited in AI compared to your competitors. It’s still guesswork, but quite useful as it gives you a better understanding of how you score against your competitors.

Citation Count, a tally of your AI mentions, which can quickly turn into a vanity metric because volume alone doesn’t really tell you anything about relevance, brand authority, or any kind of business impact.

Citation rate, how often AI gives a clickable link when it mentions your brand. This is much more of a solid metric because it tells you how often you’re getting those links.

Brand Sentiment, or whether or not your brand is represented in a positive or negative way. The AI experts at Geeky Tech assert that this metric should be taken with a grain of salt, since AI tools are pretty hard‑wired to remain neutral, even when directly prompted to give negative feedback.

AI Visibility Score, or the composite estimate of how often and how prominently your brand appears in AI‑generated responses compared to your competitors. Keyword being: estimate.

Trust me when I say that you’re going to make your life a lot easier if you use a tool to help you do this.

Since the purpose of this entire exercise is to give upper management something to really sink their teeth into, you should probably make sure your GA4 is set up to capture referral traffic data. This can help you isolate and filter your referral sessions specifically from these LLM channels.

Now I know GA4 referral traffic isn’t going to tell you which prompts got visitors through the door, but it is one of the more convincing metrics because it connects AI visibility to actual site visits, which makes it much more useful as supporting evidence.

So, now that you have a list of prompts, the next step is to watch what they do in the wild.

A single snapshot isn’t going to tell you all that much, so it’s standard practice to look at the trends in your metrics rather than a single view on a single day. A monthly cadence might be better if you’re starting from scratch, but if you’re actively in GEO, you could start looking at weekly trends.

An upwards trend is always a good sign. It’s an even greater sign if other metrics like sessions, impressions, clicks, conversions, SQLs, MQLs, BBLs, NFLS, LOLs (wait) start to improve.

A straight line may mean that your efforts haven’t really moved the needle in any way. And in this case, I don’t think the whole “no news is good news” adage is necessarily the best one to lean on here. A downward trend is, well, surely a sign that it’s time to work on your PR game and probably your content. But wait a second, aren’t mentions and PR just backlinks and referrals? Yup.

So the trillion dollar question is, then what? What do you do if you notice that a particular competitor always seems to steal your share of voice in Claude for a specific topic? How do you fix your site so that Perplexity starts including your brand in commercially motivated prompts?

What actually improves your GEO? Because while we like to say that the secret behind good GEO is just really good SEO, there are enough differences in these two strategies to merit their own chapter break.

Now, if you’re using an AI tool like GeekyIQ, then the hard work will be done for you. You don’t have to do anything like reverse‑engineer your competitor pages to figure out what they’re doing better than you.

But if you want to do it alone, here are some real ways to make a difference to your LLM visibility:

For starters, since brand authority is something LLMs look out for and since they scrape data from all across the web to provide responses, you definitely need to make sure that your off‑page visibility or PR is on point. That means your GEO game needs to include strategies for racking up solid reviews, mentions from distinguished sources, and stuff like that.

Then, you should focus your attention on brand consistency. Wherever you have control of your brand assets across the web—whether that’s your TikTok account, your Google Business profile, or your directory listing—absolutely everything needs to be the same in tone, language, and information.

Then of course, your content could probably use a spring cleaning. Use your E‑E‑A‑T lens to write clean, effective, thorough, and data‑backed copy. Write conversationally but skip fluffy overtures and unnecessary preamble.

Make it as easy as possible for crawlers to understand the topic and context of your page with schema and on‑page best practices. And this includes smart interlinking, so clustering your topics around a pillar page is also going to help your visibility. I did cover this in a recent episode, so I’ll be sure to include a link to that. And for the love of god, if you’re only using AI to write your content, at least assign yourself the task of reviewing, editing, and fact‑checking its output before you publish the text, because nothing kills credibility more than a shallow bit of BS that anyone with the right prompt could have generated themselves.

And it’s not like I haven’t said this a million times across the years already, but don’t just produce butt‑loads of content for the sake of it.

Human beings at this point are tired of useless slop. Yes, covering a topic is important, but what we and AI crawlers really care about are things that really convince us of your expertise. A template is really pretty, but they’re a dime a dozen. Instead, focus on high‑quality research, case studies, white papers, and collaboration.

If your mention rate is low, work on building your off‑page presence.

If your citation rate is low, start earning recommendations through PR, industry publications, and the like.

If your name is missing from certain topics, you know which content you need to work on.

If LLMs are incorrectly or unfairly representing your brand, you can trace the claim back to the source and ask the site owner for a correction, although there’s no guarantee they’ll change it. The more reliable move is to make sure the information on pages you control is accurate, current, and consistent. It’s also worth responding to negative reviews professionally and encouraging happy customers to leave honest feedback, because over time that can help improve brand sentiment.

Make all these changes and track your progress again. Now, of course you should be fixing these critical issues as soon as you start analysing your visibility, but as a practice, you’ll have to rinse and repeat these steps, just like with SEO.

Up next, how to actually present all of this to your boss without making it sound like you’re packaging up a pretty dashboard based on guesswork just to make them happy.

The trick is to stop treating AI visibility as a standalone number and start treating it like part of a bigger story.

What leadership really wants is evidence. They want to know whether your visibility is improving, whether the brand is getting more traction, and whether any of this is actually translating into something tangible for the company. So the smartest move is to pair your AI visibility metrics with concrete supporting signals from GA4 and GSC.

That’s where, dare I say it, SEO comes in.

If your AI visibility is rising and your search signals are moving too, that gives you a much more believable story. You might see more branded searches, more impressions, more clicks, or more traffic to the pages tied to the topics you’ve been working on.

And while none of that proves direct cause and effect, it does give you a coherent narrative: the brand is showing up more, people are paying attention, and the work is starting to make a difference.

Something like Data Studio can help you bring it all home because it gives you one report and reinforces the very true fact that GEO and SEO are a match made in heaven.

The only thing that’s left for you to do is use this evidence to explain why all of it matters. The real goal isn’t to prove that one AI mention caused one click. It’s to show leadership that AI visibility is (hopefully) improving, search signals are (hopefully) moving up, and your broader marketing strategy is (hopefully) building real traction. I mean, if these numbers aren’t going up, you might want to consult a GEO and SEO agency to help refocus your strategy for the biggest impact. And you know what, I think I know a good one.

And that’s all for today, folks. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with your AI‑obsessed colleagues and loved ones. Our next episode will be airing in September, if the planet doesn’t spontaneously combust before then, so be sure to set your alarm.

Now, in our last episode, I accidentally cut myself off from my grand finale, so this time, my sign‑off is going to be even