GEO metrics, defined.

Visibility rate

The share of tracked queries where an AI engine mentions you at all. It's the floor. Being visible means you made it into the answer, not that you were recommended. A vendor can be highly visible and rarely chosen.

Example: you appear in 40 of 150 tracked queries, a 27% visibility rate.

Citation rate

The share of responses where an engine references one of your pages as its source. This is distinct from visibility. Visibility means you were named; citation means your content was the thing the engine pulled from. Citation is what on-page content work most directly moves.

Example: an engine names you in an answer but links a third-party article as its source. That's visibility without citation.

Share of voice

Your portion of all vendor mentions across the full query set: presence measured against the competitors buyers are comparing you to, not in isolation. Rising share of voice means you're taking conversational space from alternatives.

Example: across all queries, 200 vendor mentions occur and 30 are you, a 15% share of voice.

Win rate

Of the queries where you're visible, the share where you're the primary recommendation: the vendor the engine surfaces first, or tells the buyer to evaluate first. Win rate isolates quality of position from breadth of presence.

Example: you're visible in 40 queries and the lead recommendation in 10, a 25% win rate.

Reading the four per platform

These four aren't single blended numbers. Each reads separately across Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, because every engine has its own source diet. A strong citation rate in one engine and a blank in another isn't an average to smooth over. It's a specific, targetable gap.

Example: strong citation in ChatGPT, absent in Perplexity, points to a coverage gap to close, not a footnote to average away.