What metrics should I track for GEO?
Direct answer
The key metrics to track for GEO are AI citation frequency across platforms, AI referral traffic from sources like chat.openai.com and perplexity.ai, featured snippet ownership rates, and schema validation pass rates. Traditional rankings still matter, but GEO-specific metrics reveal whether your content is actually being cited by AI engines. The SEORav AI Citation Checker automates citation tracking across major platforms.
Key facts
- AI citation frequency measures how often your pages are cited or summarized by generative AI engines
- AI referral traffic appears in analytics as referrals from chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, and gemini.google.com
- Featured snippet win rate indicates which queries you own in the traditional snippet layer that feeds AI Overviews
- Schema validation rate ensures your structured data is being parsed correctly by crawlers and AI systems
Per-platform citation share
GEO success differs significantly across Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, and You.com, so track each separately. For your target query set (50 to 200 queries depending on category breadth), record citation share per engine weekly. A page might dominate Perplexity but get ignored by AI Overviews because of different ranking weights. Per-platform tracking surfaces which engine likes which content style and informs the rewrite roadmap.
Share of voice within your category
Beyond raw citations, measure share of voice: of all citations across your target queries, what percentage are your domain versus competitors? A rising citation count means little if a competitor is gaining faster. Track the top 5 cited domains per query monthly and your relative share. Pages where competitors with weaker classical SEO are winning citations often signal that your extractability or freshness is the issue, not authority.
Practical takeaway
Monthly report: per-platform citation count, share of voice in top 50 queries, dateModified currency on top pages, and number of original data points published that quarter. Set a citation share target per engine (for example, 15% on Perplexity, 8% on AI Overviews) and track quarterly. Use the gap between platforms to prioritize content style adjustments.