What we measured about it: searched 4,400 times a month at difficulty 54 of 100; we also measured how often AI answers even appear, in three markets, twice each.
Run on your market, a read shows: your real search demand under every phrasing, which AI answers in your market are open, partial or closed (with the evidence), what your competitors run in the public ad archives, and your break-even numbers computed from your own economics.
Book the 20-minute callor read the measured pieces first →Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your pages the source that AI-generated answers cite: Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT's browsing answers, Perplexity's citations. Classic SEO competes for a ranked list; GEO competes for the handful of citation slots inside the answer itself.
The term is searched about 4,400 times a month in the US, with a keyword difficulty of 54 of 100 and advertisers paying up to $31.14 for the top ad slot above it. measured
How often an AI answer is even there
GEO only matters where an AI answer actually appears, so we measure that first, twice per query, at least 30 minutes apart, because the answers change. Across three markets we measured in August 2026:
In detail: B2B marketing queries carried an AI Overview on 20 of 30 of the questions we read across two pulls (2 answers changed between pulls). Plant-based food queries: 13 to 14 of 30. CPG snack queries: 15 to 17 of 40, with 4 answers changing between pulls. measured
Two-pull protocol: every AI Overview presence figure is read twice, 30+ minutes apart. A single pull overstates stability; the disagreement counts above are why.
The gap GEO actually exploits
The strongest pattern in our door data: AI answers on commercial questions are figure-poor. Of the partial-opening doors we classified in the B2B marketing market, 12 of 12 carried one decision figure or none: they name options but give the reader no numbers to decide with. A page that supplies the missing figures, with sources, is the page the answer needs. That is the whole playbook, and it is why every page on this site registers its figures with a source and a pull date.
What to do about it, concretely
1. Measure whether AI answers exist on your buyers' questions (twice). 2. Classify each as open (no answer yet), a partial opening (the answer measurably stops short), or closed (complete and held by strong sites), and spend nothing on closed doors. 3. Publish self-contained, figure-carrying passages on your own domain for the open and partial ones. 4. Re-check the citations after 60 days and keep score.
We publish measured examples of such gaps inside our field notes, like the CPG snacks benchmark.
One read: your demand, your winnable AI answers, every competitor's ads, and your site's catch rate. Every number measured or labeled as an assumption. Price and scope discussed on a short call, plainly.
Book a call or see what a read contains →