For twenty years the question was "where do we rank in Google?". Today a growing share of buyers never see ten blue links. They read an AI Overview at the top of the results page, ask ChatGPT for a recommendation, or have Gemini compare three vendors for them. In those answers there is no page one and no position four. There are businesses that get mentioned, and businesses that do not.
This guide covers how to actually check whether AI engines mention your business, what makes them cite you, and how to track it over time instead of asking ChatGPT by hand every week.
GEO, AEO and AIO: what the acronyms mean
Three terms showed up in the last two years, and they are still not defined the same way everywhere. Here is the practical version:
- GEO — Generative Engine Optimization. Work aimed at getting your content cited or mentioned inside an answer an AI engine composes from several sources. The term comes from an academic paper out of Princeton and Georgia Tech, and it is the one the market settled on.
- AEO — Answer Engine Optimization. The older term, from the era of featured snippets and voice assistants. Its goal is to be the answer that gets selected and displayed.
- AIO. Be careful with this one: some people mean Google's AI Overviews, others mean "AI optimization" as an umbrella over GEO and AEO. If a vendor offers you "AIO services", ask which one they mean.
In practice the boundaries blur, and plenty of agencies use all three interchangeably. What is not blurry is the order of work: sound technical SEO first, then content structured so an engine can lift a precise answer out of it, then the entity and citation work that makes engines recognise you as a real authority in your field. There is no GEO without SEO — an engine that cannot crawl and parse your site will not cite it either.
Three reasons to start measuring now
You have no idea what is being said about you. An AI engine answers in free prose. It can recommend you, recommend your competitor, or describe your offering incorrectly, and nothing tells you which.
The answer is not stable. The same question asked on two engines, or on one engine two days apart, can return a different shortlist. A one-off check proves nothing. What proves something is tracking: the same questions, the same engines, repeatedly, with a history you can read.
Being in the answer is worth far more than moving up a rank. A generated answer names two or three options, not ten. The gap between inside and outside is much larger than the gap between position three and position five.
How to check AI visibility, step by step
1. Write questions the way a buyer talks, not the way a keyword reads
Classic SEO tracks a phrase: "product photographer online store". In an AI engine the buyer writes a sentence: "I need a product photographer for a jewellery store in Austin, who would you recommend?". The questions worth tracking are the ones that force the engine to recommend a vendor, compare options, or answer a professional question you are genuinely expert in.
2. Check several engines, not one
ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI draw on different sources and phrase things differently. Checking one of them shows you a third of the picture.
3. Read what was said, not just whether you appeared
A mention is the start. What matters just as much: were you named first or last, were you linked, and which competitors appeared beside you. That competitor list is valuable on its own — it is the set of businesses the engine currently believes answers your buyer's question.
4. Repeat on a schedule
AI visibility moves. One check is a snapshot; a series is a trend, and only a trend tells you whether the work you did changed anything.
How Go Top SEO does this for you
The AI visibility module is built around exactly those four steps, without running them by hand:
- Questions generated from your business. The system proposes questions based on the industry, services and location you set up in the project, and you add your own.
- Three engines in one click. Every question is checked on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI. A single-engine check, or a check on more engines — Perplexity, Copilot and Grok — sits in the question's own menu.
- Answer analysis. The answer itself is stored, with whether your business was mentioned, where in the answer, and which competitors showed up alongside you.
- History and a visibility score. Every check is kept, so you read the trend rather than today's single result.
The point is that this is not a standalone tool. The same platform holds Google organic rank tracking, Google Maps tracking by precise location, a Search Console connection and competitor tracking — so one report tells you both where you stand in classic search and where you stand in AI answers. Automatic rank tracking runs monthly, and you can run a manual scan at any moment.
What makes an AI engine willing to cite you
An engine composing an answer is looking for passages it can lift precise information from. What works:
A direct answer at the top of the section. A heading phrased as a question, then two or three lines that answer it. Every caveat and detail comes after.
Numbers, ranges and conditions. "Pricing runs between X and Y depending on Z" is a sentence an engine can quote. "Pricing varies by requirement" is a sentence nobody will ever quote.
Visible first-hand experience. This is the core of E-E-A-T: your actual process, the mistakes you keep seeing clients make, what you do when it goes wrong. That exists nowhere else, which is precisely why it gets selected.
Clean structure. Hierarchical headings, lists, a comparison table, an FAQ block. Not cosmetics — this is what lets an engine work out which part answers what.
Correct schema and metadata. A site that does not make clear who wrote it, what it is about and when it was updated starts at a disadvantage.
In the platform, that work lives in the content and publishing module: keyword research that produces a topic list, a content strategy that spreads it across the month, article writing with the headings, lists and FAQ block already in place, internal links to your existing pages, and publishing straight to your site. On WordPress that goes through our plugin; for Shopify stores it goes through our app on the Shopify App Store. The site health module covers the technical side: missing titles and meta descriptions, images with no alt text, broken links — each one approved by you before it is applied, and each one reversible.
What to do this week
- Write five questions a real buyer would ask an AI engine before buying from you.
- Run them on three engines and save the answers.
- Mark the competitors that kept reappearing.
- Pick the question where you are missing, and write a page that answers it better than anything you saw in those answers.
- Check again in a month and compare.
Plans
Four plans, each with a seven-day free trial. The price shows in your own currency and the allowances are per month:
One website
Basic
- 4 articles a month, written and published to your website automatically
- 1 website
- Track up to 50 keywords
- Up to 50 Google ranking checks a month
- Up to 10 AI visibility checks a month
One website
Advanced
- 12 articles a month, written and published to your website automatically
- 1 website
- Track up to 100 keywords
- Up to 100 Google ranking checks a month
- Up to 20 AI visibility checks a month
Multiple websites
Premium
- 50 articles a month, written and published automatically, shared across all your websites, up to 5 a week per website
- Up to 10 websites
- Track up to 100 keywords per website
- Up to 200 Google ranking checks a month per website
- Up to 20 AI visibility checks a month per website
Agencies
Agency
- 200 articles a month, written and published automatically, shared across all your websites, up to 5 a week per website
- Up to 100 websites
- Track up to 200 keywords per website
- Up to 400 Google ranking checks a month per website
- Up to 50 AI visibility checks a month per website
No credit card. Cancel any time.
Full details are on the pricing page. Agencies managing client sites have their own page, and so do WordPress site owners.
Frequently asked questions
What is GEO in SEO?
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization: the work of getting your content mentioned or cited inside answers composed by AI engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews.
How do I check whether ChatGPT mentions my business?
Write the questions a buyer would ask before purchasing, run them in the engine, and check whether your business appears, where in the answer, and next to which competitors. To see a trend rather than a snapshot you need to repeat the same questions on a schedule, because the answers change.
What is the difference between GEO and SEO?
SEO measures your position on Google's results page; GEO measures whether you are mentioned inside an answer an AI engine wrote. GEO does not replace SEO, it depends on it: an engine that cannot read and understand your site will not cite it.
Which engines does the platform check?
Every question is checked on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI in one click. A single-engine check, or more engines — Perplexity, Copilot and Grok — is available from the question's menu.
How often are rankings checked?
Automatic Google rank tracking runs once a month, and you can run a manual scan at any time. AI checks are run by you, within your plan's allowance.
Is there a free trial?
Yes, 7 days on every plan.