Official AI reports have emerged, but they do not represent a complete market share.
The Google report measures the visibility of websites within Google AI features, while the Bing report measures the mentions within supported Microsoft AI experiences. Their platforms, focus, and available fields are all different, so they cannot be combined to form an "AI market share." Neither ChatGPT, Perplexity, nor other platforms provide a comprehensive cross-platform brand mention dashboard. Therefore, the report must separate "official mentions," "official references," "website traffic," "query sampling," and "business results" to avoid misleading conclusions.
The five measurement signals are used to answer different questions.
There isn't a single metric that definitively proves GEO (Google Elevation) generates business. If there's visibility in Google Search results but no clicks, it could mean that users have already found the answer in the search results, or that the page simply doesn't have enough compelling reasons for users to click. If there are referrals but no inquiries, it's important to first check the case studies, calls to action, and service suitability before adding more content.
The five signals measured by GEO| Signal | Questions that can be answered | Main limitations |
|---|
| Google Generative AI | Which pages on Google AI gained the most visibility? | It is currently only available for a limited number of websites, and does not offer functionality for searching, clicking, CTR (click-through rate), or ranking. |
| Bing AI Performance | Which URLs were cited, and what grounding queries did they correspond to? | The number of citations is not a measure of ranking, authority, or presentation position. |
| GA4 | Where do users come from when they access the website, and what do they do afterward? | The data is only available if you click on the link; some traffic may be underestimated. |
| Predefined query sets | Does the sampling problem involve issues related to brand, origin, and description? | The answers are influenced by the account, region, model, and randomness. |
| Source of information | Does the visibility of AI translate into demonstrations, forms, or qualified opportunities? | It is necessary to exclude other activities, delays in conversion, and errors in customer descriptions. |
Google Generative AI Report: Focusing on Impressions and Page Views, Not Pretending to Rank
The dedicated reports display impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and can be filtered by page, country, device, and date. The data presented may be preliminary, and charts and tables may vary due to differences in how property and page data are aggregated. Currently, the reports do not provide information on queries, clicks, CTR, or average ranking, so they cannot be used to determine which AI query generates the most clicks. Relevant exposure is still included in the general Web Performance reports. If an account has not yet been assigned dedicated reports, the non-branded query, landing page, click, and CTR data from the Web Performance reports can be used as a substitute.
Bing AI Performance: Citation count is not a measure of ranking.
Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance provides a public preview of Total Citations, Average Cited Pages, grounding queries, URL-level citation activity, and time trends. This can help identify "which pages are being used as sources by the Microsoft AI experience" and "what phrases are being used when extracting information." The official documentation also clearly states that citations do not represent page authority, ranking, or position within a single answer. The report should acknowledge the gap when a page is cited but not clicked or queried, and should not be used to package citations as a measure of revenue.
GA4 and ChatGPT UTM: Simultaneously track campaign source and referrer
OpenAI states that ChatGPT searches will automatically include the UTM parameter `utm_source=chatgpt.com`. Therefore, GA4 should check both the campaign source and the session source, and cannot rely solely on `chatgpt.com` as the referrer. Parameters and domains for platforms like Perplexity, Copilot, and Gemini may change, so it's necessary to regularly verify the actual source values. The report should not only look at sessions, but also analyze case views, service_cta_click, contact_click, and generate_lead based on the landing page. Even when the app is opened, privacy restrictions are in place, or parameters are removed, some traffic may still be attributed to referral or direct, so GA4 provides evidence of "on-site behavior" rather than "overall platform exposure".
Fixed inquiries and inquiries: Filling in blanks in official reports
While keyword sets targeting ChatGPT, Perplexity, or unlinked brands may still be useful, they only represent a sample. The questions should focus on the actual decision-making scenarios of customers, using new conversations and consistent phrasing each month, and recording the date, platform, model, brand mention, URL, and page. The results can only be used to observe the relative trends of this set of questions, but cannot be used to infer market share. To determine whether the AI phone cluster is generating qualified inquiries, it is necessary to compare the results with the service=ai_voice, contact clicks, and customer-provided sources from the form during the same period.
Decide on the next step based on the data, not on the number of articles written.
First, categorize the pages monthly based on their landing page and search intent. If a page has high visibility but low click-through rates, prioritize optimizing the title, description, and search summary. If a query matches the existing page's intent but the ranking is unstable, add supporting evidence, decision-making information, and internal links, without creating a new URL. Only create new articles when there is a clearly different purchasing or technical intent, and there are no existing pages on the site that can be reasonably expanded upon. If AI recommends a page that has been viewed but not queried, prioritize revising the case evidence, call-to-action, and form process, without adding more content.
