Three Metrics That Predict GEO Success Before You Commit
You've heard the pitch: "Our platform gets you into ChatGPT. Our AI will optimize your content. Trust our model." Every GEO vendor says the same thing. None of them show you the math.
The problem is real. Your B2B site needs visibility inside generative engines—ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews. But GEO is still young. Vendors lack maturity metrics. You're comparing vaporware against vaporware, and your budget is real.
Three concrete metrics exist right now that predict whether a GEO vendor actually works. They're measurable. They're vendor-agnostic. And they cut through marketing.
Citation Depth: How Often Your Content Gets Referenced
Citation is the unit of currency in generative engines. When Claude answers a question, it cites sources. When Perplexity builds a response, it pulls from indexed content. The more your pages appear as citations across different queries, the deeper your presence in these systems.
Citation depth isn't about traffic. It's about frequency. A vendor claiming they got you "into ChatGPT" proves nothing. Prove it by showing citations across ten different AI engines over a 30-day window. Demand the breakdown:
How many unique queries cited your content?
Across how many different engines and models?
What was the citation velocity before and after their work?
Real GEO vendors track this. They have dashboards. They can tell you Tuesday's citation count versus Monday's. If they can't, they're guessing.
Authority Alignment: Are You Positioned Where It Matters?
Not all citations are equal. A citation inside a response about enterprise software carries different weight than a mention in a consumer Q&A. Generative engines prioritize sources based on domain authority, topical relevance, and semantic alignment with the query intent.
What you need to measure
A vendor should show you a heat map of where your citations cluster. Are they appearing in responses about your actual competitive terms? Or scattered across low-intent, low-revenue queries?
Authority alignment means being cited for the 10 queries that matter to your revenue, not the 100 that don't. That difference is the entire ROI equation.
Ask for evidence of semantic positioning. Show me citations for queries like "API management platform for microservices" (your target) versus "what is an API" (everyone's target). The first tells you the vendor understands your market. The second tells you they spray and pray.
Domain authority within the generative layer
Your SEO domain authority is useful data, but it's incomplete. Generative engines rank sources differently than Google. A vendor who maps your authority inside the generative ranking model—not just SEO rankings—deserves serious consideration.
Content Coverage: Breadth vs. Depth Trade-Off
Most B2B teams face a choice: optimize a huge volume of pages with shallow GEO tactics, or deeply optimize a focused set of high-intent content. Both approaches exist. Neither is universally correct.
What matters is your vendor's honesty about the trade-off. A vendor claiming they'll get all 2,000 of your pages into generative engines is lying. Generative engines have citation budgets. They'll cite a subset of your content. The real work is deciding which subset matters most.
Evaluate vendors by how well they help you choose. Can they:
Identify which pages have the highest citation potential based on your competitive landscape?
Explain why some content will be cited and some won't?
Show you the data behind their content selection?
Coverage breadth is a trap metric. Depth is where ROI lives.
How Modulus Approaches This
We measure GEO success through the lens your CFO actually cares about: citation velocity and authority alignment within generative systems. We don't promise coverage of 10,000 pages. We identify your 40–60 highest-impact pages, optimize them for generative retrieval, and track citation emergence across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and AI Overviews weekly.
Our approach starts with a GEO audit—we map your current citation profile, identify authority gaps, and model where your content should appear in generative responses. Then we build semantic optimization workflows that increase citation depth without compromising your SEO baseline.
If you're comparing GEO vendors, ask them for citation depth metrics, authority alignment data, and honest coverage forecasts. We publish ours. Learn how Modulus handles Generative Engine Optimization and see what measurable actually looks like.
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Originally published on the Modulus1 insights blog. Browse more analysis on AI, SEO, and automation.
