Topic-Based GEO: Why Single Visibility Percentages Don’t Make Sense

From countless conversations with clients, leadership teams, and prospects, we’re convinced most brands are making a critical mistake in how they think about GEO strategy: they view AI visibility as a brand-level metric, when it should be considered on a topic-by-topic basis. 

Here’s an example: company leadership asks marketing, “How are we doing on GEO/AEO/AIO?” Marketing turns to a tool like Peec or Profound, which spits out a single brand-visibility percentage, usually shown in a graph. Marketing reports back to leadership, “We have 26% visibility!” 

If that number is higher than last week, everyone’s happy and thinks marketing is “doing their job.” If it’s lower than before, leadership assumes something is wrong and wants marketing to change what they’re doing.

Below, we argue that this approach doesn’t make sense because it’s fundamentally the wrong way to think about GEO performance. 

A brand’s “AI search visibility” isn’t a brand-level metric. It’s a function of the specific topics or prompts being measured.

Reporting visibility at the brand level—especially as a single percentage—is, at best, unhelpful and, at worst, outright misleading. 

As we explain below, this mindset can lead to several negative outcomes, including: 

• Manipulation of metrics to make GEO performance appear stronger than it actually is
• A focus on “ranking” for prompts that have little to no business value
• Marketing teams being disincentivized to push harder or pursue more ambitious GEO strategies
• Resources wasted on activities that have no real impact on lead generation or revenue

Visibility Happens at the Topic Level, Not the Brand Level

If you remove the AI visibility tools and their dashboards from the picture, the idea of a single “AI visibility score” falls apart. In the real world, no brand has one. 

AI search visibility isn’t like domain authority in SEO, which represents a real, meaningful concept: how much weight Google’s algorithm assigns to a domain when deciding what to rank. In SEO, a site with high domain authority will, on average, outrank a site with low domain authority, all else being equal. 

There’s no real-world equivalent to a single AI search visibility percentage. Brands have visibility—or don’t—within specific topics. And if a brand has strong visibility in one topic, that visibility isn’t correlated, based on any data we have seen to date, with its visibility in another. 

By its very nature, AI search visibility is a topic-specific concept. 

Topic Level Visibility Is Actionable

More practically, we believe viewing visibility at the topic-by-topic level is how marketing teams learn which actions actually improve AI search visibility. When teams rely on a single, overall visibility percentage instead, those details get buried and the signal becomes misleading.

Here’s a real example from one of our clients, Mirascope, which has strong visibility on the topic of “prompt engineering tools”:

By contrast, on the topic of “context engineering platform,” they have far less visibility:

What does averaging these two together tell the Mirascope team? Nothing useful.

Leadership should think about visibility in these two topic areas completely separately. The actions required to improve visibility for “context engineering platform”—publishing more content on the topic, clearly explaining how Mirascope supports context engineering, and conducting citation outreach on relevant articles—will have no impact on visibility for “prompt engineering tools.”

The SEO analogy applies here. If Mirascope ranked #1 for the keyword “prompt engineering tools” and #60 for “context engineering platform,” what use would it be to average the two and report on a blended rank? No one does this in SEO because it makes no sense. 

Yet this is exactly what happens in GEO, largely because popular AI search visibility tools default to showing a single, overall brand visibility percentage in their dashboards. 

Single Visibility Percentages Create the Wrong Incentives

A single AI visibility percentage often becomes misleading (at best) or downright manipulated (at worst).

Consider what happens when a marketing team starts tracking additional prompts—aspirational topics they aren’t yet visible for but want to be. Adding those prompts, by definition, drives the overall visibility percentage down. 

On the surface, it looks like AI search visibility declined. Leadership may even comment on it or assume marketing isn’t doing their job well. But nothing bad actually happened. Visibility across ChatGPT and other LLMs is exactly the same as it was the day before. The only change is that the team is tracking more topics and being more ambitious about its GEO goals.

Here’s a concrete example. On January 13, the visibility score in Peec for this brand was 26.7%: 

On January 14, we added two new prompts that were relevant to the brand but had no visibility. As a result, the visibility score dropped to 20%: 

In reality, the brand lost no visibility. The metric only looks worse because new prompts were added.

This creates terrible incentives. It encourages marketing teams to be less ambitious. Teams are incentivized to avoid tracking new prompts because doing so makes their visibility percentage look worse. 

That’s the exact opposite of good marketing. Teams should be encouraged to identify new, high-value topics they want to rank for—not discouraged from tracking them.

How Our Visibility Tool Traqer Solves This

This is exactly why we built Traqer to be topic-based.

Topic-level visibility sits front and center in our tool, and that’s how we report on GEO visibility to our clients.

This page is what marketing teams can share directly with executives or clients. At a glance, everyone sees visibility by topic and can quickly understand where their brand is performing well and where it isn’t.

In the Mirascope example above, it’s immediately clear that they perform well for “prompt engineering tools” but have work to do for “context engineering platform.” No one has to dig through reports or click elsewhere to find this information. 

Yes, Traqer also includes brand-level metrics at the top. But instead of collapsing everything into a single percentage, those metrics show the total number of topics where visibility is low, medium, or high. This distinction matters. Adding new topics doesn’t artificially reduce performance elsewhere. 

This approach does two important things:

• It aligns incentives correctly. You can add 10, 50, or 100 new topics or prompts without hurting your overall score.
• It keeps teams focused on what’s actionable: which topics already have strong visibility and which ones need work.

The Right Way to Think About GEO Visibility

Regardless of whether you use Traqer, another tool, or track visibility manually in a spreadsheet, our recommendation is to think about GEO visibility at the topic level. That’s the proper way to approach GEO strategy.

Overall brand visibility percentages are, in our opinion, a lazy way to assess GEO performance. They hide the details that should (1) guide your strategy and (2) show your team whether GEO efforts are actually working.

When you track topic-level visibility, you can:

• Identify which topics need immediate attention
• Allocate content creation resources to the right areas
• Measure progress on specific topics and initiatives
• Avoid false signals from percentage fluctuations
• Make data-driven decisions about where to focus your GEO efforts

It’s the difference between knowing you have “32% visibility” and knowing you dominate prompt engineering conversations but need work on context engineering topics.

One tells you nothing. The other tells you exactly where to focus next.

Further Reading

• You can read the full Prioritized GEO strategy we execute for clients.
• You can read more GEO strategy articles.
• You can check out Traqer for proper AI visibility tracking.
• You can reach out about working with us to improve your GEO.