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GEOoptimised

AI search · Evidence ledger · Checked 2026-07-10

4 of the most-repeated claims in AI search have no source we could find.

We went looking for the primary source behind every number this industry repeats. Some reproduced exactly. One drifted by a factor of ten in the retelling. Four lead nowhere at all. Below is the ledger, and beneath it, the list of every tool we review and precisely what each one pays us.

Read the ledger See who pays us →
03
VERIFIED
04
REFUTED
06
MISLEADING
03
DIRECTIONAL
02
UNREPRODUCED
04
UNTRACEABLE

22 claims graded. Every grade links to its primary source. Disagree with one? The method is published, so you can check us.

We turned this into a study nobody else runs. Of 22 of the field's most-repeated statistics, only 27% survive a check against their own primary source. Read the reproduction study →

Start with the number everybody quotes

If you have read anything about generative engine optimisation, you have met the 40% figure. It comes from a real, peer-reviewed paper. It does not mean what the marketing pages say it means.

MISLEADING #forty-percent

The claim, as it circulates

“Generative engine optimisation boosts a brand's visibility in AI answers by up to 40%.”

The paper says this. The paper is measuring a benchmark, not ChatGPT.

What the source actually says

The uplift is measured on GEO-bench, a research benchmark the authors introduce in the same paper, using a 'visibility' metric derived from how much of a generated response is attributable to a given source. It is a controlled lab result. It is not a measurement of citation behaviour on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews, and the paper does not claim it is. Almost every marketing page that repeats the 40% omits this.

“GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses.”

Source
Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan & Deshpande , GEO: Generative Engine Optimization
Published
2023-11-16, last revised 2024-06-28 (v3). Accepted to KDD 2024.
Sample
GEO-bench, a benchmark of diverse user queries across multiple domains
Reproduction
We reproduced this from the primary source. checked 2026-07-10

We fetched the arXiv abstract and confirmed the sentence verbatim, and confirmed GEO-bench is introduced by the same paper. The abstract page does not state GEO-bench's query count, so we do not publish one. Figures of '~10,000 queries' circulate; we could not confirm that number from the abstract and have not read the full PDF.

Read the full anatomy of the 40% claim →

The conflict, stated up front

Some of the best tools in this field cannot pay us a penny.

Ahrefs closed its affiliate programme in 2019. Screaming Frog has never run one. Profound, the category leader, publishes no payout at all. Meanwhile Nightwatch pays 30% for the lifetime of every customer we send, on a 365-day cookie. Every listicle you have read about AI visibility tools was written by someone facing that arithmetic. Most of them do not mention it.

What tool pricing tells you about ROI

Entry-level tools (£99–£299/month) attract price shoppers and churn quickly because limited keyword coverage and monthly rescans do not provide enough data to see whether anything moved. Mid-tier tools (£299–£799/month) hit the ROI sweet spot: weekly rescans with unlimited keywords let you correlate your efforts to changes in the metric. Premium tools (£1,000+/month, often negotiated) justify cost through account management and integrations for enterprises that need visibility measurement embedded in board reporting. Before committing to any tier, ask: has my underlying visibility work (publication placement, thought leadership, analyst relations) already begun to move the needle? If no, no tool will help. If yes, mid-tier tooling is usually where you see payback within six months.

What the tools we review pay GEOoptimised
Tool What it pays us Model Are we enrolled?
Nightwatch 30% lifetime recurring No
Otterly.ai 20% recurring, first 12 months only No
Ahrefs NOTHING no programme No
Screaming Frog NOTHING no programme No
Clearscope NOTHING no programme found No

As of today we are enrolled in none of them, so nothing on this site earns us anything. That will change, and when it does the table above will say so on the same day. The full table, all 16 tools →

How much does AI visibility cost, and is it worth it?

If you are evaluating whether to spend on AI visibility work, the price varies wildly depending on what you buy. A tracking tool costs £99 to £5,000+ monthly depending on query coverage and feature depth. An agency retainer costs £1,500 to £5,000 monthly. But the hidden cost is this: most organisations spend on tools before spending on the underlying work (publication placement, analyst relations, thought leadership) that actually generates citations. The result is a paid dashboard watching a metric that does not move, because the work that moves it is unfunded.

Tool costs: entry to premium

Entry tier (Peec AI, Rankscale): £99–£299/month for limited keyword tracking and monthly rescans. Mid-tier (Nightwatch, Gumshoe): £299–£799/month with unlimited keywords and weekly scans. Premium (Profound): £1,000–£5,000+/month negotiated based on scale. Most organisations sit in mid-tier and see better ROI than entry, because weekly data reveals whether anything you changed actually moved the metric.

Agency retainer costs: measurement without motion

GEO retainers cost £1,500–£3,000/month and deliver optimisation recommendations plus monthly reporting. PR retainers at the same price point deliver one to two publication placements per quarter, a measurable outcome you can audit. Analyst relations at £1,000–£2,000/month secures analyst briefings. The distinction matters: PR and analyst work move the underlying metric (third-party mentions). GEO work optimises a site for a signal (AI citation) that research shows does not respond reliably to any on-site tactic.

The honest answer to "should I spend here" is: run a free audit first. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Search for your brand five times. If your company appears in three of five, you have baseline visibility and do not need to spend yet. If it never appears, the block is not a tool—it is that your brand is not mentioned enough in third-party sources to be in the training data. Fixing that costs money, but tool money will not fix it. Spending on publication placement, Reddit participation, and analyst inclusion will. A tool cannot create visibility; it can only measure whether you actually have it.

Why this site exists

You are being sold a promise with no measurement

A new agency, tool or consultant has told you that you need "AI visibility" or "GEO". They have shown you a case study. Almost none of those case studies carry a control group, a method section or a baseline. The industry's most-repeated statistics—the 40% uplift, the Reddit mention correlation, the market size projection—lead to no primary source when traced. This site was built to answer the question: what is actually evidenced to work?

You are competing with disclosure, not content

Most guides to "the best AI visibility tools" are written by people who earn 20% to 30% from every recommendation. Almost none of them say so. This site publishes exactly what every tool pays us, who we are enrolled with, and which of the best tools cannot pay us a penny because they have never run an affiliate programme. We do that not because we are virtuous but because the conflict shapes the entire field, and the only way to be believed is to show your work.

You want to know if you are visible without buying software

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews yourself. Run a query about your business five times. If your brand appears in three of the five, you have baseline visibility. If it does not, the problem is not technical and no tool will fix it. The visibility you have comes from third-party mentions—analyst rankings, news coverage, industry publications, Wikipedia—not from anything you can optimise on your own site. A tool can measure that visibility. It cannot create it.

You need to explain this to your team and your customers

You will find on this site sourced answers to every question the industry repeats: Is GEO a scam? Can you rank in AI? Does schema help? Are the tools reliable? Each answer traces back to a named person or study. That same grading and sourcing is what makes the site useful inside your own business: you can say "Ahrefs tested this on 1,885 pages" or "Rand Fishkin ran this with 600 volunteers" instead of passing along an unverified claim.

Correction 001

The first error in the ledger is ours.

This is the exact failure this site exists to catch, and we committed it on day one, on the single claim we were most confident about. A real statistic drifted by a factor of ten in the space of one retelling. Nobody lied. Somebody paraphrased.

Every correction we have ever made →

We said

SparkToro found that AI assistants return an identical brand list less than 0.1% of the time.

Actually true

SparkToro found that the same brand list repeats less than 1 time in 100 (under 1%). The 1-in-1,000 figure, about 0.1%, applies to getting the same list in the same ORDER. The two are routinely conflated.

Logged 2026-07-10

What this site is not

  • Not an agency. We sell no GEO services. There is nothing to book.
  • Not a tool vendor. We have no dashboard to defend and no subscription to protect.
  • Not ad-funded. No display advertising, now or later.
  • Not quiet about the conflict. Where we do earn a commission, we say so on the page, in the row, every time.

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