Choosing KPIs for Generative Engine Optimization Campaigns

Summary

Choosing KPIs is organization, industry, and campaign specific. Start by defining a clear goal: visibility, competitive positioning, traffic, or conversions. Then choose 3–5 metrics that fit your campaign’s maturity level and review them monthly.

Metrics fall into three tiers:

1. Foundational – Visibility, citations, and accuracy in AI responses.
2. Input – Technical health, content effectiveness, and trust signals that influence inclusion.
3. Business outcomes – Engagement and conversions tied to AI referrals.

Establish a baseline before optimizing, focus on actionable data, and adapt as the industry matures. GEO success comes from tracking the few metrics that matter and acting on them.

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When choosing KPIs for generative engine optimization, you need to decide what you’re trying to achieve, whether that’s increasing brand visibility in AI answers, competing with specific rivals, driving traffic from AI platforms, or generating leads. Some metrics will feel familiar if you track SEO: traffic, conversions, and technical health indicators still apply. But GEO requires measuring things traditional analytics don’t capture, like whether your content appears in an AI-generated response, which specific pages get cited for what prompts, and how accurately your brand is represented.

Our approach is straightforward: define your goal, choose metrics that match your program’s maturity level, set a baseline, pick 3-5 core metrics, and review monthly. More frequent checks introduce noise; less frequent reviews miss trends. Avoid the temptation to track everything at once.

How do I start the process?

Start by defining what you’re trying to achieve. Common goals include increasing visibility in AI answers, outperforming specific competitors or brands, driving more traffic from AI platforms, and generating leads or conversions. Your goal determines which metrics matter. If accuracy is your concern, say, ensuring AI platforms correctly describe your products, you’ll prioritize different KPIs than someone focused on traffic.

Match your metrics to the company’s level of sophistication. If they’ve done extensive content and earned media work in the past, they may already visible. If not, you can start with basic metrics and add complexity as your GEO program matures. Foundational metrics like visibility and citations come first; engagement and conversion tracking comes later. Teams that jump straight to advanced metrics often lack the baseline data needed to interpret them.

Before tracking anything, establish where you stand. Run common prompts to see current visibility. Without a baseline, you can’t measure improvement. Then choose 3-5 core metrics and focus on what matters for your current goal rather than tracking everything. More metrics doesn’t necessarily mean better insights.

What metrics should I consider?

For simplicity’s sake, we’ve established three categories:

Foundational metrics

Visibility measures whether you’re showing up in AI responses. Track your presence across platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini. This is the starting point—if you’re not present, nothing else matters.

Citations show which pages are being linked and referenced in AI answers. Track your citation rate, where citations appear in the response, and which specific URLs get cited. Position may matter, though empirical data on citation click-through rates isn’t yet available.

Accuracy requires manual review of how your brand is represented. AI platforms sometimes provide outdated or incorrect information. Regular review ensures factual correctness and alignment with your positioning.

Input Metrics

Technical health covers infrastructure that enables AI discovery: schema validity, crawl access for AI bots, load speed, and indexability. Server logs can show whether AI crawlers are accessing your content and how frequently.

Content effectiveness measures how well your content aligns with natural language queries. Track content freshness, structured formats like FAQs, and coverage across your target topics. The percentage of relevant prompts where you appear indicates how well your content matches what people ask.

Authority and trust signals include third-party links, directory placements, and which sources are citing you in AI responses. Track the quality and credibility of sources that mention your brand. Are authoritative publications, influencers, or industry sites referencing you? The sites that are important will vary depending on your client, organization, and vertical. Review recurring sources to understand which third-party domains AI platforms trust when generating answers about your space.

Note: AI systems assess authority differently from search engines. Traditional SEO factors like backlinks and domain authority still help, but generative models also rely on dataset trust, citation frequency, and cross-source consistency. Weighting of these signals is opaque and model-specific.

Business outcomes

Engagement from AI platform referrals includes standard analytics: time on page, bounce rate, and pages per session. Segment this traffic to understand how visitors from AI citations behave compared to traditional search traffic.

Note: I don’t like to track engagement metrics without context. In my experience, they’re often treated as a main course rather than seasoning.

Leads/Conversions connect GEO efforts to revenue. Track conversions (again, conversions are highly dependent your organization and vertical) from AI platforms and compare performance against other channels to understand how AI-referred visitors convert.

Where Should Different Teams Focus?

For agencies starting out with GEO, start with foundational metrics to demonstrate client visibility in AI responses. Use input metrics to explain your optimization strategy and technical recommendations. Prove ROI with business outcomes—traffic increases, conversion improvements, and revenue attribution.

For in-house teams, track foundational metrics and business outcomes for leadership reporting. Use input metrics internally to guide your optimization work and identify technical issues or content gaps that need attention.

For government organizations, prioritize visibility, accuracy, and coverage. Your goal is ensuring citizens find correct information from official sources. Business outcome metrics matter less than confirming your agencies appear accurately in AI responses to public interest queries.

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Measuring GEO efforts are made more complicated because major platforms do not provide prompt data. Platforms are forced to extrapolate (read: guess) prompt volumes based on Clickstream data or “proprietary secret sauce”. Keywords aren’t a direct correlate. You’ll work with more uncertainty and fewer established benchmarks—which makes sense for a nascent industry like generative engine optimization.

Pick metrics that match where you are now, considering where you want to be in six months. If you’re not visible yet, don’t obsess over conversion rates. If you can’t access technical health data, focus on what you can measure. A sophisticated dashboard is not the measure of a campaign’s success. Start with baselines, review monthly, and change course as you receive additional data points.