Most brands lack visibility into how AI models describe them to potential buyers. While you refined your message, generative AI became a primary entry point for B2B discovery, and you may not like what it says about you. This is the next step in the evolution of digital marketing, and getting it right is no longer optional.
Just as location-based search became critical for local businesses, visibility within AI engines is now essential for B2B brands. After all, 89% of marketers saw higher sales after adopting location-based advertising, showing that being found where your buyers are is tied to revenue. This shift needs a new strategy: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
This article provides an 8-step framework to audit your brand’s visibility, positioning, and sentiment in AI-generated answers. You will learn how to see what AI thinks of you, your competitors, and your category, giving you the insights needed to strengthen your GTM strategy.
What Is a GEO Spot-Check (and Why Does Your GTM Plan Depend on It?)
A Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) spot-check is a manual audit to see what AI tells buyers about your brand, your competitors, and your market. It is a direct look into the narrative that large language models are building around your company. This process reveals how you are positioned, whether the information is accurate, and where you appear in key buyer journeys.
GTM teams are already changing how they talk about this shift. On an episode of The Go-to-Market Podcast, host Dr. Amy Cook and guest Saul Marquez discussed this exact change, with Marquez noting, “It’s gone away. It’s now GEO. Right. It’s generative engine optimization.” This marks a fundamental change in how brands approach online visibility.
This audit is not just a marketing task; it is a Revenue Operations imperative. An inaccurate AI narrative can silently undermine your entire GTM plan. When 76.6% of sellers are already missing quota, companies cannot afford a disconnect between their planned strategy and how buyers actually perceive them in these new discovery channels.
Your 8-Step Framework for a GEO Spot-Check
This repeatable framework provides a structured way to measure your brand’s AI footprint and turn your findings into a clear action plan.
Step 1: Define Your “Golden Prompts”
Golden prompts are the questions your ideal customers ask when researching a problem or comparing solutions. They are typically non-branded and focused on needs, use cases, or categories. Create a list of 10 to 15 prompts across three key areas: top-funnel (e.g., “What are the best strategies for sales territory planning?”), mid-funnel (e.g., “Compare sales performance management software”), and bottom-funnel (e.g., “What is the best alternative to [Competitor Name]?”).
Step 2: Choose Your AI Engines to Test
Your buyers are not using a single tool, so your audit should not either. Focus on the major platforms where B2B research is happening. Your list should include ChatGPT (3.5 and 4.0), Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude, to ensure broad coverage of the AI landscape.
Step 3: Run the Prompts and Capture the Outputs
Create a simple spreadsheet to log your findings systematically. For each prompt you run in each engine, capture the following data points:
- Visibility: Did your brand appear? (Yes/No)
- Position: If yes, where did you rank? (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.)
- Citations: Were any of your web pages or content assets cited as a source?
- Sentiment: Was the description of your brand positive, neutral, or negative?
- Competitors: Which competitors were mentioned alongside you or instead of you?
Step 4: Add a Quick Branded Search Check
In addition to your golden prompts, run a few branded queries like “What is [Your Brand]?” or “What are the pros and cons of using [Your Brand]?” This helps you validate the core information AI models have about your company, such as your founding date, key features, and ideal customer profile. Misinformation here signals an issue that requires immediate attention.
Step 5: Score Your GEO Footprint
Turn your raw data into measurable metrics to track progress over time. Create a simple scorecard with four key scores:
- Visibility Score: The percentage of prompts where your brand was mentioned.
- Position Score: An average of your ranking across all mentions.
- Citation Score: The percentage of mentions that included a link to your content.
- Sentiment Score: A qualitative score (e.g., 1 for negative, 2 for neutral, 3 for positive).
Step 6: Benchmark Against Competitors (Share of Model)
Your visibility exists relative to your competitors. Track their performance for the same golden prompts to calculate your “Share of Model” (SoM), which is the percentage of total brand mentions in your category that belong to you. This metric provides a clear benchmark and helps you understand your competitive positioning within AI-generated answers.
Step 7: Turn Findings Into Actionable Insights
With your data collected and scored, you can build a prioritized action plan. Common next steps include:
- Fix Visibility Gaps: Create new content that directly answers the prompts where you failed to appear. Use your team’s internal expertise to produce authentic, helpful resources.
- Correct Misinformation: If AI models state incorrect facts about your product, identify the likely source content (often third-party review sites or old press releases) and work to get it updated.
- Close Citation Gaps: For prompts where you are mentioned without a link, identify the best-fit content on your site and work to build its authority so AI models are more likely to cite it in the future.
- Address Sentiment Risks: A negative sentiment often points to a larger issue, such as poor customer reviews or a competitor’s successful counter-positioning.
For a more comprehensive approach beyond a spot-check, you can conduct an AI audit to find and fix deeper content gaps.
Step 8: Set a Cadence for Spot-Checks
Generative models are updated constantly, so your AI footprint is not static. Establish a regular rhythm for auditing your presence. We recommend monthly quick checks on your top five golden prompts and a full, deep-dive audit on a quarterly basis to align with your GTM planning cycles. Since 8 in 10 US consumers search for businesses online weekly, this consumer data still reinforces how often people look for businesses, which supports a regular check-in cadence.
A structured 8-step process turns GEO from an undefined concern into a measurable and repeatable part of your RevOps function.
From Audit to Action: Connecting Your GEO Footprint to Your Revenue Engine
A GEO spot-check is an excellent diagnostic tool, but insights without action have little value. Fixing your brand’s AI narrative requires an integrated system that connects your GTM plan to your execution engine. While the evidence here focuses on local marketing, high-performing brands are more likely to operate with a dedicated strategy. Treat GEO the same way, as a defined, ongoing program. This is where a Revenue Command Center becomes important.
A strong, well-defined GTM plan provides the clear, consistent source material that AI engines need to understand who you are, what you do, and who you serve. When your planning is agile, you can respond quickly to the insights a GEO audit provides. For example, Udemy reduced planning time by 80% with Fullcast, giving them the operational speed to adapt to market changes, including those driven by AI.
An integrated platform brings planning, content, and execution into one place. With tools like Fullcast Copy.ai, you can speed up the creation of GTM-aligned content that directly informs AI platforms. By using performance-to-plan tracking, you can monitor whether your efforts to improve your AI visibility are translating into real-world results.
A Revenue Command Center ties your GEO strategy to day-to-day execution, ensuring your brand narrative is consistently and accurately represented from plan to pay.
Take Control of Your Brand Narrative in the AI Era
Operating without clear insight in the age of AI is no longer an option. A GEO spot-check is not just another marketing task; it is the first, essential step toward taking control of your brand’s narrative where it matters most. This is a fundamental part of modern go-to-market strategy and the next step in the evolution of digital marketing. Ensuring your brand is represented accurately is a RevOps imperative that directly impacts performance.
To put your findings to work, here are your immediate next steps:
- Act Now: Block 60 minutes on your calendar this week. Use the framework above to run your first 10-prompt spot-check and establish a baseline for your brand’s AI footprint.
- Think Strategically: Use the results of your audit to inform your next planning session. Prioritize fixing visibility gaps and misinformation by building a plan for targeted, GTM-aligned content.
- Unify Your Efforts: See how Fullcast’s Revenue Command Center helps teams connect strategy to execution. If it fits your approach, evaluate whether it can help you keep your plans, content, and operations in sync.
FAQ
1. What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the next stage of search optimization, designed for the age of AI. While traditional SEO focuses on ranking in a list of links, GEO focuses on influencing the answers, summaries, and conversations generated by AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. The goal is to ensure that when potential buyers ask AI for recommendations or information, your brand’s narrative is accurately and favorably represented. It’s about shaping the AI’s understanding of your brand so you become a trusted part of its response.
2. Why is GEO important for my business?
GEO is critical because buyer behavior is shifting. Instead of sorting through search results, customers are turning to AI for direct answers and product comparisons. If your brand is misrepresented or invisible in these AI-generated responses, you lose a crucial opportunity to influence buyers at the very beginning of their journey. This disconnect between your strategy and how buyers discover you can directly harm your pipeline and revenue goals, especially when sales teams are already facing pressure to perform.
3. How often should I conduct a GEO spot-check?
We recommend conducting a GEO spot-check at least quarterly, or whenever you launch a major product or marketing campaign. The AI landscape and the information models use are constantly evolving, so your brand’s narrative can change without warning. Regular monitoring should be a repeatable process built into your revenue or marketing operations. This consistent cadence ensures you can quickly adapt to shifts in how AI perceives your brand and keep pace with modern buyer behavior.
4. What does a GEO spot-check involve?
A GEO spot-check transforms general concerns about AI visibility into a clear, actionable plan. The process typically involves four key steps:
- Define Key Prompts: Identify the critical business questions, competitive comparisons, and pain points your target customers are likely to ask AI engines.
- Audit AI Responses: Systematically test these prompts across major generative AI platforms to capture how your brand is currently being portrayed.
- Analyze Gaps: Compare the AI-generated answers against your official brand messaging, value propositions, and strategic positioning to identify inaccuracies or omissions.
- Create an Action Plan: Develop a targeted content and optimization strategy to correct misrepresentations and improve your visibility for key customer queries.
5. How does GEO connect to my revenue operations?
GEO provides vital intelligence that directly impacts your entire revenue cycle. Insights from GEO spot-checks reveal how the market actually perceives your brand, your competitors, and your value proposition through AI channels. This data should be integrated into your central revenue operations to inform sales enablement materials, marketing campaign messaging, and customer success playbooks. By connecting GEO insights to your operational reality, you ensure that your go-to-market teams are equipped to handle the AI-driven narratives that buyers bring into the sales process.
6. Is GEO replacing traditional SEO?
GEO does not replace SEO; it builds upon it. Think of SEO as the foundation and GEO as the next level. Strong SEO practices, like creating high-quality, authoritative content, are essential for getting your information into the AI models’ training data. However, GEO takes the next step by focusing on how that information is synthesized and presented in conversational answers and summaries. SEO helps the AI find you, while GEO helps control what the AI says about you. Both are essential for a complete digital visibility strategy.
7. What happens if my brand isn’t optimized for generative engines?
Failing to optimize for generative engines makes your brand vulnerable to being invisible or, worse, misrepresented. If you are not part of the AI-generated conversation, potential buyers may never discover you. The AI could recommend your competitors, cite outdated information about your products, or incorrectly summarize what your company does. This creates a significant gap between your intended go-to-market strategy and the buyer’s actual discovery experience, costing you credibility, pipeline, and valuable revenue opportunities before your sales team can even make contact.
8. How can I make GEO a repeatable part of my operations?
To transform GEO from a one-off project into a systematic business function, you should integrate it into your existing operational rhythm. Here’s how:
- Establish a Framework: Adopt a consistent methodology for how you audit prompts, analyze AI responses, and measure visibility gaps over time.
- Assign Clear Ownership: Designate a person or team within your marketing or RevOps function to be responsible for conducting regular GEO spot-checks.
- Integrate with Existing Cadences: Make GEO analysis a standard agenda item in your quarterly business reviews or monthly go-to-market meetings.
- Create a Feedback Loop: Ensure that insights from GEO audits are shared with your content, product, and sales teams so they can take action to close any identified gaps.
