How to Choose GEO Software

A GEO software demo usually opens on one number: your share of AI answers. Before you buy, ask which questions that share divides by, how often they were asked, and whether you can open the answers behind it.

The number matters because buyers now ask an assistant which supplier to call. In Gartner's survey of 645 B2B buyers, 45% used generative AI in a recent purchase, mainly to research vendors and products.

So AI answers have become a channel buyers use to find suppliers, and most companies have nobody running it. In Forrester's survey of its B2B marketing community, 70% of marketers called AI visibility a top priority for their CMO or CEO, and only 30% of companies had named an owner for it.

These are the tests I'd put any tool's number through, ours included. The guide also explains how we handle the measurement and review at Qvery.

The tool also comes last. Software runs two of the five jobs the channel needs, so the channel gets an owner, a question list and a review date before it gets a vendor.

The buyer surveys describe buyers in general, and our own figures come from other companies' questions. Use both to set up your own trial, not as a reading of your market.

AI Answers Are a Sales Channel Your Analytics Barely See

When Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of US adults in March 2025, Google users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, against 15% for users who saw none. They clicked a link inside the summary in 1% of visits.

Across more than 1,200 publisher and news sites, Microsoft Clarity found AI referrals still under 1% of overall traffic.

So a visit count leaves out the buyer who read an answer and never clicked. The channel surfaces later, in conversation: in the same Gartner survey, 69% of buyers said they prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep.

Your inquiry form can ask, with "an AI assistant such as ChatGPT" among the answers to "How did you first hear about us?"

Neither tells you what the assistant says when nobody calls. For that, someone must own a record of the answers and decide what to change. GEO software supplies the record.

The Channel Is Five Jobs, and Software Runs the First Two

Picture an illustrative freight forwarder of 200 people. A buyer asks an assistant who handles cross-dock transfers in the Midwest, and the answer says the company serves only the coast.

Fixing that takes five pieces of work. Someone asks the question and keeps the answer. Someone reads it against the company's own facts and marks the wrong sentence.

The web manager corrects the services page the answer cited, last edited two years ago. The partnerships lead writes to the logistics directory whose profile repeats the old line.

And a rep mentions that two prospects this month said "coast only" on calls, which tells the owner the pipeline has already felt it.

In the GEO Agent's daily records of buyer questions for August and September 2026, mostly from software firms and travel operators, the company's own website was 6.32% of what ChatGPT cited and 6.26% of what Google AI Mode cited.

Most cited pages belong to someone else. Changing them takes a request to their owner, not a different measurement tool.

A tool with no owner behind it reports to nobody. The directory profile keeps saying "coast only" until somebody writes to it.

Two names go on the request before any vendor does: the owner of the channel, and the person who handles other people's pages.

A Share Is Only as Good as the Questions, Engines and Repeats Behind It

A share of AI answers is a fraction: the answers that name you, over all the answers to your questions.

The Questions Must Come From Your Buyers, Whoever Writes Them

Buyers type whole questions into an assistant. Pew found AI summaries on 60% of Google searches that began with a word like who, what or why, and on 8% of one- or two-word searches.

A list of two-word search terms measures the kind of search that gets an AI answer least often.

So the questions come from your calls and inquiry emails: what buyers asked before they chose you or someone else, in their words. An assistant can pull them out of a quarter of call notes, and the list it returns is a draft for the owner to cut.

Some tools write the list for you, from your brand, your industry and your competitors. Either way, hold their list against your call notes before you trust a share built on it.

Keep the question list fixed: adding questions changes what the share divides by. New questions sit in their own group until they have a month of history.

The Engines Must Be Your Buyers', Asked the Way Your Buyers Ask

An engine count on a pricing page says how many places a tool asks, not whether your buyers are there. Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude answer buyers too; ask your reps which ones prospects mention before you pay for a longer list.

OpenAI's API documentation says developers must enable web search, and the model can still choose not to search. Ask whether the tool collected a web-grounded answer.

In the ChatGPT app, OpenAI says ChatGPT may search automatically when a question would benefit from current information, may send several narrower queries to its search partners, and may use an approximate location from the user's IP address.

So ask every vendor two things: does it ask the product your buyers use, with search as they get it, or a model through an API; and from which country.

A tool's result may differ from the answer on your phone.

OpenAI says ChatGPT can use your approximate location. Ask where the tool's session runs, and compare the saved answers with what you saw.

One Asking Is a Sample, So the Cadence Comes From the Decision

Ask an assistant the same question twice and you can get two different answers.

Thinking Machines Lab tested why even a model set to be predictable varies. In their experiment with one model and prompt, 1,000 completions produced 80 different texts.

The GEO Agent's daily records show what that does to a share.

For companies named in at least a tenth of their market's answers, asking each question once and then asking the whole list again put the same company's visibility a median 3.00 points apart, and 8.00 points or more one time in ten on ChatGPT (7.29 on Google AI Mode).

Asked every day for a month, the two halves of the month landed a median 0.68 points apart on ChatGPT. The share-of-voice piece works through that band. A move smaller than that spread is hard to tell from the wobble of asking again, and more repeats narrow it.

Answers to read in a month are questions times engines times the number of times each is asked, so for 20 questions on two engines:

At two minutes to ask, read and log an answer by hand, a figure to replace with your own after you time five, a weekly read is about 5.3 hours a month and a daily one about 40 hours, a working week.

Pick the cadence from the decision. Testing a rewritten page needs many repeats to detect a small move. Even then, a narrower band shows that something moved, not that the page caused it.

A wrong sentence about your company is worth fixing whether or not the share around it moved, and a weekly read finds it.

If the hours at your cadence fit beside the owner's week, the owner can do it by hand. If they don't, software takes over the asking and the keeping, and what's left is the reading against your facts.

A Number You Cannot Open Is a Number You Take on Trust

Every Answer and Every Cited Page Has to Be Kept

A share says how often you were named. The answer says what was said, and the cited pages say where it came from, which is where job four starts.

Google's documentation says AI Mode may use a "query fan-out" technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources, and shows a wider set of links than a classic search.

In our research, a same-day comparison on 15 October 2026 found that 89.6% of the websites ChatGPT cited and 76.8% of those Google AI Mode cited were not on Google's first page for the same question.

A rank report can't stand in for the cited pages, so the tool has to keep them, and let you export them.

The Share Has to Say What It Divides By

Visibility, share of voice and average rank sound alike and answer different questions.

Share of voice can fall while you are named just as often, and average rank can improve while you are named less.

In the GEO Agent's daily records, among companies whose average rank improved by more than a quarter of a position from August to September 2026, 37.09% on ChatGPT and 36.79% on Google AI Mode were named in fewer answers or sat no higher relative to the list length.

So ask which of the three a headline number is and what it divides by. A rank on its own decides nothing.

The Error That Costs You Is a Wrong Sentence, and a Share Counts It as a Mention

In a study by 22 public broadcasters, led by the BBC, 45% of AI assistants' answers about the news had at least one significant issue, and 20% had major accuracy problems, including invented details and information past its date.

Those were answers about news, not companies, and the last of those issues is one a company meets too: stale information, repeated as current.

A share counts an answer that says you serve only the coast as a mention. Sentiment won't catch it either: "recommended for coastal freight" is positive and wrong. The test is whether the tool shows you the sentence, so someone can check it against your facts.

The GEO Agent keeps a daily record you can put through these tests. Its price is not published.

Have an Agent Read Each Week's Answers Against Your Fact Sheet

An agent can check each saved answer against your fact sheet. The brief below keeps the owner responsible for corrections.

Here is the brief for whoever builds it.

1. 01

   What It Reads

   The week's answers and cited pages from the tool's export, and the fact sheet. Nothing it would have to fetch from someone else's website.

2. 02

   When It Runs

   Every Monday morning, after the week's askings have landed.

3. 03

   The Rule It Checks

   Every sentence that names your company, against the fact-sheet line it touches. A contradiction becomes a row; a sentence that matches no line becomes a question for the owner.

4. 04

   What It Produces

   A register: the question, the engine, the sentence, the cited page, the fact it contradicts, and a suggested correction.

5. 05

   Who Approves

   The owner signs each row before anyone edits a page or writes to another site. The agent sends nothing.

6. 06

   How It Is Counted

   The hours the Monday read took by hand against the hours it takes now, and the wrong sentences the owner finds in ten hand-read answers that the register missed.

The agent lists other people's pages for a person to open and request corrections. Automated access depends on each site's terms.

Write the fact sheet first. Service areas, credentials, and prices kept in people's heads give the agent nothing to check. The sheet helps even if you never build an agent.

Build the agent when the cadence your decision needs takes the reading past the hours the owner can spare.

How Qvery Handles the Answer Review

We help you judge the answers before you judge the score. The GEO Agent prepares buyer questions using your brand, the industry you sell into, and competing companies. ChatGPT and Google AI Mode get this question list daily for countries you choose. It retains the full responses and the citations attached to them.

You see your visibility alongside competitors, with share of voice plus sentiment shown country by country and topic by topic. The cited sources show us where to work on the facts and pages buyers encounter.

For a review that outgrows manual reading, we study how you maintain the fact sheet, then give the comparison to a custom agent connected with the systems your reviewers already use. Each week it runs the comparison on its own and prepares corrections for your owner to approve.

We deliver your first working answer review within two weeks; your reviewers learn to handle its flags with us. Each week thereafter, we measure the reading hours saved and the factual errors caught before approval. Bring the export that makes this review possible.

Run a Two-Week Trial on Your Own Questions, Then Pick One of Four Setups

Before any demo, build the yardstick yourself. Ask ten of your buyers' questions on ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, save each answer with its sources, and mark what is wrong.

Give every tool on the shortlist the same list for two weeks. Then open five of its answers for questions you asked by hand, and run the six tests on what you find.

For the illustrative forwarder, a weekly read takes about 5.3 hours a month under the timing assumption above. If that fits the web manager's week, keep the work manual.

A daily read takes 40 hours under the same assumption. That puts software on the shortlist, with a trial file ready to test it.

If you want names for that shortlist, we rank ten AEO tools by who will run the monthly review, and sort nine more by where the software stops.

Start the file this week: ten questions, both engines, every answer saved with its sources. Every demo after that gets held to it.