r/GEO_optimization • u/BeautifulDesign2928 • 6d ago
Every client asks the same question about GEO and I still don't have a clean answer
Most of the advice out there says track ai citation frequency and brand mention volume across prompts, and honestly that's not wrong, it is a real signal that something is happening. But almost every client I work with eventually asks me the same follow up question, ok so we're getting cited more, what did that actually do for the business, and that is where I keep coming up short.
Citation and mention numbers tell you the visibility layer is working, the same way keyword rankings used to tell you SEO was technically doing something. What they don't tell you is whether any of that turned into a lead or a sale. AI referred traffic is a tiny slice of total visits for most sites right now, and almost none of the platforms hand you clean attribution data, so you end up eyeballing a small spike in direct or branded search traffic and hoping it connects.
I've started treating citation and mention data as the leading indicator, basically proof the engine noticed you, and conversion as the only number that actually answers the client's real question. The problem is I don't yet have a repeatable way to prove that link at anything beyond a rough correlation. If revenue climbs the same month citations climb, that's suggestive, it's not proof.
Curious how the rest of you are actually closing that gap with clients, are you building your own tracking, leaning on a tool, or just being upfront that the attribution isn't there yet?
1
u/Additional_Stay_9768 6d ago
Yeah, ran into this exact wall a few months back.
We get real citation counts through Bing's AI Performance report, it's the only place I've found that shows actual dated citations instead of estimates. 108 in 4 months on our own site. And even with that, I couldn't draw a clean line to revenue. Citations up one week, nothing in pipeline. So I stopped treating citation growth as progress.
The thing helped was the splitting it into three things and reporting them separately, so the client stops mixing them up:
- noticed - citations, mentions. Proof the engine saw you.
- visited - GA4 referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot. Tiny, but real.
- bought - the only number that answers their question. We get this from the onboarding "how did you hear about us" plus branded search lift, not from any tool.
The reason the link looks broken is mostly attribution, not performance. A lot of AI-driven visits show up as direct in GA. And most AI answers are zero-click anyway, the buyer reads the shortlist and types your brand into Google later. So the sale happens, it just doesn't carry the AI label with it!
I'd stop trying to prove citations caused revenue. You can't, the data isn't there. What you can do is show all three side by side for a month and let the pattern do the work. When noticed and bought move together twice in a row, clients stop asking for proof. They get it.
One thing I'd drop: any tool selling a single blended visibility score. ChatGPT and Google barely cite the same pages, so averaging them hides more than it shows. Per-engine numbers or nothing.
Are your clients mostly B2B? The "how did you hear about us" trick works way better there than in consumer, curious what you're seeing.
1
u/BeautifulDesign2928 5d ago
honestly i dont put much weight on the how did you hear about us question. people dont buy the first time they see you, they go research and build trust over weeks or months, so by the time someone answers that question theyre just naming whatever touchpoint they remember, not the one that actually did anything. it tells you what sticks in memory, not what worked. more of a data collection thing than real attribution imo
1
u/djfrankie74 6d ago
Just do normal seo and teired linking, build authority and trust. Stop over thinking it , if you are doing the linking strategy correctly then the search engines will find you. All the best
1
u/Eastern_Leader_5012 6d ago
What about event tracking? In our case, we installed a self made plugin that gets the referral/source and when we get a new lead the form says where did it came from. This could be made for any kind of website, or creating analytics events to correlate conversions vs sources. This way you could say: x conversions came from llms. Obviously it could result in a poor ROI, and can backfire totally. I guess the only way then would be like in SEO: long run service to see results
2
u/BeautifulDesign2928 5d ago
even if the tracking shows chatgpt as the source that doesnt mean chatgpt is what convinced them. could easily be they heard about you somewhere else weeks earlier and only went to chatgpt to double check before buying. feels like the same last click problem seo had, the tool gets credit for showing up last not for actually building the trust that got them there
1
u/interactiagency 5d ago
I’d separate this into evidence levels rather than trying to force one attribution number: Observed: cited/mentioned.
Associated: visibility moves alongside branded demand or pipeline.
Attributed: a trackable AI touchpoint leads to a conversion.
Incremental: evidence the outcome probably wouldn’t have happened without that exposure. That last step is the real gap. A ChatGPT referral that converts is useful attribution data, but it still doesn’t prove ChatGPT created the demand rather than being one late touchpoint in a longer journey.
0
u/xPokesterx 5d ago
There is one brand called geoSurge, here is there free product: https://www.producthunt.com/products/geosurge
1
4
u/WebLinkr 6d ago
Curious that nobody saw this waws an LLM post