Day 1 of tracking our own AI visibility: GEO Score 0. Here's the unflattering truth.

We built an AI visibility tracker for indie SaaS founders. The pitch sounds nice — "know whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode recommend you when buyers ask about your category." Then last weekend we did the obvious-but-uncomfortable thing: pointed the tracker at our own brand. The result is below. It is not flattering. It is also exactly the dataset I wish every shipping founder published.

0GEO Score

GEO Score · captured May 15, 2026

Zero out of one hundred

Based on 5 scans across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. The score is mention-rate × citation quality, weighted by engine market share. Methodology link below.

ChatGPT

0%

Perplexity

0%

Google AI Mode

0%

This is real. Five pulse scans, 15 scan results (one per query × three engines), zero recommendations of geotrackerai.com. Across 10 monitored questions about AI visibility tracking, the engines we built our entire product around did not cite us a single time.

What we actually asked the engines

Ten tracked questions, monitored on daily Pulse. A representative cross-section:

• What tool can track my visibility and rankings on Perplexity?
• What's the best AI search visibility tracker app for monitoring ChatGPT mentions?
• Ai mode tracking google (yes, with the casual lowercase — that's how people type it into ChatGPT)
• How do I monitor whether AI engines cite my brand?

These are exactly the buyer questions our ICP would type. The fact that we don't surface on a single one of them is the only data point that matters.

Who AI cites instead

This is the part that makes you take the work seriously. When ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode answer these questions, they pull citations from somewhere. Here are the top 15 domains that came up across our 15 scan results, in raw mention count:

1. 1reddit.com6 ×
2. 2youtube.com5 ×
3. 3frase.iocompetitor5 ×
4. 4sitepoint.com4 ×
5. 5visible.seranking.comcompetitor4 ×
6. 6tryprofound.comcompetitor4 ×
7. 7medium.com3 ×
8. 8zapier.com3 ×
9. 9therankmasters.comcompetitor3 ×
10. 10siftly.ai2 ×
11. 11llmpulse.ai2 ×
12. 12rankflo.ai2 ×
13. 13erlin.ai2 ×
14. 14semrush.com2 ×
15. 15averi.ai2 ×

Read this list like a battle map. Three things jump out:

1. Reddit and YouTube together account for 11 of the top 15 citations. AI engines lean disproportionately on UGC where opinions are battle-tested by other humans. This is not anecdote — Tinuiti's Q1 2026 study measured Reddit at 24 % of all Perplexity citations, and Google's May 6, 2026 announcement added "Community Perspectives" and "Expert Advice" from Reddit and other forums directly into AI Mode. We have published zero on either surface. That's not a strategy gap; it's an absence. We unpacked the implications in Reddit Is Now Inside Google's AI Mode.

2. Four of our tracked direct competitors are in the top 15. Frase (5×), tryprofound (4×), SE Ranking visibility tool (4×), TheRankMasters (3×). These brands have been doing AI visibility content for 6–18 months longer than we have. The engines have learned to cite them as the canonical answer to "best AI search visibility tool" because the open web told them to. For the broader competitive landscape — and the action-layer gap that's our actual wedge — see 22 AI Visibility Tools, Not One Tells You What to Do Next.

3. There are 6 obscure .ai domains in the long tail (siftly, llmpulse, rankflo, erlin, averi, scrunch elsewhere in our full list) that we'd never heard of before running the scan. The category is fragmented. Nobody dominates. That is good news.

Why we score 0 — the honest diagnosis

Three independent reasons. Each one is also a lever.

A. No web footprint yet. geotrackerai.com is 3 weeks old. The site has 10 blog posts, no inbound links from sites the AI engines weight (Reddit, HN, indie hacker community). Until the open web starts citing us, the LLMs cannot cite us. They are not search engines that crawl — they are language models that learned from a snapshot of the open web. We need to be IN that snapshot. (Background on the difference: GEO vs SEO in 2026 and the pillar primer What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?.)

B. Our own queries weren't perfectly targeted. Looking at the question list above, two of our tracked queries are about product analytics platforms — a category we don't compete in. Those queries can't help us; they just burn scan budget. The Question Confidence Coach we shipped last week (V11) would have flagged them as off-target — and there's an unkindness in that, because we didn't run it on our own questions first. Step zero: take our own medicine.

C. We didn't compete on the surfaces that matter. Look at the citation list again. The places where AI looks for answers — Reddit threads, YouTube videos, comparison roundups on third-party blogs — are not surfaces we have shipped on. Yet. The 2026 hygiene checklist we wrote — AI search visibility in 2026: the hygiene checklist, four free tools, and the honest math — explicitly names which surfaces matter per engine. We just haven't executed against our own list.

The 60-day experiment plan

Five concrete experiments. Each with a measurable hypothesis. Each will be reported on at day 14, day 30, and day 60 — score went up, score went down, score didn't move — with the raw numbers.

1. EXP 01

   Audit + retarget our own questions through Confidence Coach

   Run our 12 tracked queries through the Coach we just shipped. Kill the off-target ones (the two product-analytics questions), replace with high-coherence buyer-intent questions for our actual category. Verified bucket = scan budget that earns the right answers.

   Hypothesis

   +3 GEO points from cleaner attribution alone

   Measure by

   Mean Confidence bucket distribution before/after

2. EXP 02

   Reddit / IndieHackers / HN presence (5 posts in 14 days)

   Reddit and YouTube account for 11 of the top 15 citations our engines pull from. We have published zero. Five high-context, non-spammy posts in r/SaaS, r/indiehackers, IndieHackers Milestones, HN Show HN, and Reddit r/AskMarketing — each linking back to a methodology piece, not the product.

   Hypothesis

   +8 to +12 GEO points if at least 2 of 5 posts get indexed in AI training cycles

   Measure by

   Mention rate WoW for AI visibility tracker + ChatGPT brand monitoring question cohort

3. EXP 03

   Publish our 7 comparison pages aggressively

   We have shipped 7 comparison pages (vs Profound, vs Athena, vs Otterly, vs Frase, vs Peec, vs SE Ranking, vs Writesonic) but they are not yet indexed by the engines. Outbound on 10 indie SaaS targets per week with as-featured-at hooks back to those pages = inbound link velocity.

   Hypothesis

   +5 GEO points from direct comparison-page citations within 30 days

   Measure by

   Citation rate of our own /compare/[slug] URLs in scan results

4. EXP 04

   Crawlability audit on our own site (eat the dog food)

   Our own AI Crawlability Monitor reports geotrackerai.com robots.txt / llms.txt / JSON-LD / OG / Twitter Card / bot-access coverage. We have shipped the product but never published the full audit results for our own domain. Fix anything below 80/100 in the next two days.

   Hypothesis

   +2 to +4 GEO points from cleaner technical signal — small, but compounding

   Measure by

   Crawlability composite score Δ + per-bot access matrix

5. EXP 05

   Weekly build-in-public progress posts

   Day 14, day 30, day 60 follow-ups published on the blog, cross-posted to IndieHackers Milestones, Twitter, and HN if the numbers warrant it. The point is twofold: build a content surface AI can learn from, and stay accountable to the score in public.

   Hypothesis

   No direct attribution — measured by inbound to /blog and signup?ref=case-study-*

   Measure by

   Subscribed users + signup conversions from ref=case-study-day-14, -30, -60

What I expect to find at Day 14

Almost nothing measurable yet on the GEO score itself. LLMs do not update their training data every week; the citation graph moves on a 1–3 month lag. What I expect to see at day 14 is leading indicators: the Crawlability audit at 95+/100, the Confidence Coach showing our questions all in the Verified bucket, 1–2 Reddit threads with non-zero upvotes, and 1–2 inbound links to our comparison pages.

The real test is Day 60. If we have moved from 0 to anything above 15, the playbook works. If we are still at 0 on Day 60, the playbook needs a rewrite — and you'll see that post too.

Methodology & sources

Editorial review for factual claims (as of 2026-05-18).

How GEO Score is computed: mention rate × citation quality, weighted across engines (ChatGPT 0.45 · Google AI Mode 0.30 · Perplexity 0.25). Quality is snapped to MVP bands . Engines with zero results are excluded from the denominator. Full math in /dashboard/help/methodology.

The data behind this post: pulled from the GEO Tracker production Supabase on 2026-05-18 at 09:30 UTC. Five pulse scans run on 2026-05-15 between 06:27 and 06:28 UTC, covering 10 monitored queries across three engines (gpt-5.4-mini-2026-03-17 for ChatGPT, sonar for Perplexity, DataForSEO ai_mode/live/advanced for Google AI Mode). No retroactive cleanup of the data, no engine excluded, no queries filtered out. The raw row dump can be reproduced by anyone running /grader on geotrackerai.com from a fresh browser.

Why we're a credible reporter on our own zero score: we built the system; the math is public; the methodology page above tells you exactly how to verify a number. If we manipulated this data, the next person to run the same scan would catch it. The cheapest credibility we have is being the brand that publishes its own zero.

Sources and further reading

External research cited above:

1. Tinuiti — Perplexity Citation Sources, Q1 2026. Industry-leading measurement of which domains Perplexity cites; Reddit measured at 24 % of all citations. tinuiti.com/blog/data/perplexity-citations-q1-2026
2. Google — Community Perspectives and Expert Advice in AI Mode (May 6, 2026). Official announcement of Reddit + forum integration into Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. blog.google/products/search/ai-mode-community-perspectives-expert-advice
3. BrightEdge — AI search visibility benchmarks 2026. Cross-engine citation share + sentiment shifts including Google AI Overviews behavior. brightedge.com/resources/research/ai-search

See how 22 leading SaaS brands rank on the same scale:

• AI Visibility Benchmark Q2 2026 — full ranking, per-brand drilldown, reproducible methodology. Same pipeline we ran on ourselves.

Our methodology stack — pillar posts:

• What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)? A Source-Ready Primer — vocabulary, math, monitoring framework.
• GEO vs SEO in 2026: A Practical Comparison — when each discipline applies + allocation guidance.
• AI search visibility in 2026: hygiene checklist, four free tools, and the honest math — the 5 hygiene levers + per-engine differences.
• Reddit Is Now Inside Google's AI Mode — why experiment 2 (Reddit presence) is the highest-EV lever for us.
• 22 AI Visibility Tools, Not One Tells You What to Do Next — competitive landscape + the action-layer wedge.
• Question Confidence Coach — when shipping requires unshipping first — the off-target query problem and how Coach catches it.