How Do I Know If GEO Is Working?

You find out by asking the AI tools yourself, on a schedule, and writing down what comes back. There is no dashboard that answers this cleanly yet, so the test that counts is the same one your customer runs: type the question, see whose name shows up.

This comes up on almost every call now. Someone starts paying for GEO work, three weeks go by, nothing feels different, and they want to know whether they are buying something real. Fair question. Here is exactly how I check it, and how you can check on me or on anyone else you hire.

If the term itself is new to you, start with what generative engine optimization is and come back to this one.

Write down the ten things a customer says out loud right before they call you. Not keywords. Full sentences. Things like "who is the best plumber in Meriden," "I need a roofer near Wallingford who can come out this week," or "who should I call about a leaking water heater in New Haven county."

If you cannot come up with ten, pull them off your phone. The last twenty calls you took are the list.

Keep the list frozen. The whole value of this test is asking the same questions every month, so if you swap them out you have thrown away your baseline.

ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini. Add Copilot if a lot of your customers sit at work computers all day. These tools pull from different sources and they do not agree with each other, so testing one and calling it settled will fool you in both directions.

Two rules before you start. Use a logged out window or a temporary chat, because these tools remember you, and your own business will show up far more often for you than for a stranger. And ask from inside your service area, or set the location honestly, since a question typed in Hartford and the same question typed in Branford can come back with two different names.

Named, mentioned, or absent. Named means the AI recommends you by name inside the answer it wrote. Mentioned means you turn up somewhere further down, in a list or as a source link under the response. Absent means nothing at all.

Put the ten questions in a spreadsheet, one per row, four columns for the four tools. Fill it in the same week every month. Ten questions across four tools is forty boxes. Count how many come back named. That number is the only GEO scorecard I trust right now, and it costs you twenty minutes a month.

Write down who did get named, too. That part is worth more than your own score. If the same shop in Cheshire keeps coming back for six of your ten questions, go read their website and their Google Business Profile. You will usually spot the reason inside five minutes, and it is almost never that they spent more money than you.

The first is your analytics. Visits from AI tools arrive with a source you can see: chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com, claude.ai. In Google Analytics you can filter sessions down to those and watch whether the count climbs month over month.

Know what that number is not, though. It is smaller than the truth and it always will be. When someone reads about you inside ChatGPT and then types your business name into Google, that visit gets counted as a Google search. When they read about you and pick up the phone instead, nothing gets counted at all. Some visits lose the source on the way over and land in your direct traffic. Treat AI referral traffic as a floor, never as the total.

The second is Google Search Console. Since June 2026 it reports impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, so you can see which of your pages are getting pulled into generated answers, broken out by date, country and device. What it does not give you is the question that triggered it, the clicks, or where you sat inside the answer. It tells you that you were used. It does not tell you why, and it will not tell you whether anyone cared.

So both reports are useful and neither one is the scorecard. The spreadsheet is the scorecard. The reports tell you whether the spreadsheet is lying to you.

Ask people how they found you. Put one line on your contact form and ask it out loud on the phone.

When you start hearing "I asked ChatGPT and it gave me your name," that is your result. It shows up in conversation months before it shows up cleanly in any report, and it is the version your accountant cares about.

The first 30 days, expect nothing in the answers. Everything happening that month is structural: separate pages built for each service, your name, address, phone and hours matched across every listing, schema markup added, reviews starting to come in on a regular schedule. None of that shows up in an AI answer yet, but all of it is checkable today. Open the site, open the listings, count the new reviews. If those things are not there, the work is not being done and you have your answer early.

Somewhere around 60 days the score starts to move, and it moves on the long specific questions first. "Emergency water heater replacement in Wallingford on a Sunday" flips to named long before "best plumber in Connecticut" does. That is normal, and the specific ones are the calls you want anyway. Perplexity usually shifts first, ChatGPT next, Google last, because Google leans hardest on the map and the reviews.

By 90 to 120 days you should be named in a real share of those forty boxes. If you started at zero, a third of them is a good place to be. By month six the pattern usually settles, and the businesses that kept publishing and kept collecting reviews are the ones getting named for the questions that carry money.

That is the honest timeline. Anyone quoting you two weeks is selling something.

The score sits flat at zero across all four tools after 90 days, no new pages went up, your listings still do not match, and no new reviews came in. That is not slow. That is nothing happening.

There is a second version that looks like progress and is not. The AI names you but gets the details wrong: an address you moved out of two years ago, hours from before you changed them, a service you stopped offering. That is a consistency problem, not a content problem. Somewhere out there is a stale copy of your business information and the AI found it and trusted it. Track it down and fix it at the source, because writing another blog post will not cover it up.

And if the monthly report you get from an agency is a chart of keyword rankings with one line about AI at the bottom, they are not doing this work. Ask to see their prompt log. If there is no log, there is no test, and if there is no test then nobody knows whether any of it is working, including them.

You do not need a paid AI visibility tracker at two hundred dollars a month to get started. Those tools run a bigger prompt list than you would by hand and they draw nice charts, and there is a point where that is worth paying for. That point is not month one. Run the spreadsheet yourself for six months first, because doing it by hand teaches you how these tools talk about your industry, and a chart will not.

Ignore anyone promising a guaranteed spot in ChatGPT answers. Nobody controls the output. What you can control is whether your business is easy to read, easy to verify against everything else on the web, and worth naming. Do that and the answers follow. Skip it and no amount of spending fixes it.

Also stop grading yourself on total traffic. AI answers are getting better at handling the tire kickers before they ever reach you, so it is normal to see flat visits and more phone calls at the same time. Count the calls.

Running the ten question test on your own business is free and I would rather you do it than take my word for anything. If you would rather have someone else run it and tell you what the results mean, that is part of the free 90 Day Growth Plan I put together for local businesses around Wallingford. I run your questions through the AI tools, look at your website, your listings and the competitors getting named ahead of you, then tell you the short list of things worth fixing and the order to do them in. It takes fifteen minutes. If the AI tools are already naming you and your problem is somewhere else, I will tell you that instead.

Book a 15 minute call