Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Scorecards Explained

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AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews are transforming how users access information—and much faster than anyone expected just a year ago.

Success in search engines does not necessarily guarantee success in the LLM arena.

For marketers, this presents a new challenge.

How can your brand and its thought leaders stand out in AI-generated answers? How do you ensure that your company’s expertise, identity, and messaging are not only recognized but trusted by LLMs?

It’s time to prepare your brand for the future of search. We’ve developed a solution to help you lay out a roadmap for success in AI search results: GEO (generative engine optimization) Scorecards.

What is GEO?

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the process of optimizing a brand’s or thought leader’s digital presence to ensure it is accurately recognized, represented, and prioritized by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and others.

While both GEO and traditional search engine optimization (SEO) work to improve a website’s visibility GEO takes a broader—and in some aspects, more technical—approach. Here’s how they differ:

  • Purpose
    • SEO: To improve a website’s rankings in search engine results and drive visibility among target audiences.
    • GEO: To ensure a brand or thought leader is accurately recognized and perceived as authoritative by LLMs, resulting in greater visibility across AI-generated responses.
  • Scope
    • SEO: Primarily domain-focused, usually emphasizing the optimization of a single website’s content and backlinks.
    • GEO: Encompasses the overall brand’s digital footprint and authority as a recognized entity across the various data sources that LLMs reference.
  • Practices
    • SEO: Combines on-site, on-page, and off-site strategies to maintain site health, create high-quality content, and build backlinks.
    • GEO: Builds on SEO fundamentals while emphasizing technical elements like schema markup, consistent entity data, and a strong off-site presence (on other websites, LinkedIn, Google Business Profiles, etc.)

GEO gives brands a framework for ensuring their digital presences mesh with how LLMs “think” and process information.

Remember, these systems don’t just list websites; they create summaries, comparisons, and narratives based on the data they encounter. Your data—your brand’s story, expertise, value proposition, and more—all need to be highly legible. For marketers, this means focusing on the bigger picture of how the brand itself is understood in a generative-first world.

Why is GEO Important?

A successful SEO approach (like the holistic, targeted, and quality-backed strategies we recommend) can give you a solid footing for GEO success. But it’s not enough.

AI search tools don’t operate like traditional search engines because they don’t rely solely on indexing and ranking web pages.

Instead, they synthesize information from diverse sources, including structured datasets, knowledge graphs, and even user-generated content. They operate heavily on the concept of entities—distinct identifiers like people, organizations, and products—and use these to construct the web of knowledge that powers their outputs.

While advanced search engines like Google have incorporated more sophisticated systems like entity mapping in recent years, LLMs go a step further. They generate more context-rich narratives and insights based on how entities are related, rather than just delivering a ranked list of links. The integration of this technology into search engines (like Google’s AI Overviews) will blur the lines between the two types of search going forward.

GEO practices help ensure your brand and its thought leaders are properly recognized, understood, and prioritized in a more dynamic and interconnected information environment.

Fail to establish your brand as a strong, recognizable entity, and you risk being overlooked.

After all, Google AI Overviews are extremely visible, front and center in search results for millions of users. ChatGPT has experienced unprecedented traffic growth, already ranking in at the 8th most visited site on the internet:

ChatGPT traffic ranking

Generative AI tools are quickly becoming integral to how people learn about and engage with brands. It’s estimated that over one-third of organic traffic to B2B sites could come from chatbot-style generative AI search engines over the next three years.

Optimizing your brand for these platforms will be an investment in staying competitive online.

Why We Developed GEO Scorecards

We saw the need for a structured way to help our clients navigate the changes brought by LLM-driven search platforms.

Our GEO scorecards allow businesses evaluate their readiness for the generative AI era and identify actionable steps to improve.

On a more technical level, they help you audit your brand’s legibility as an entity (how easily LLMs can identify you) and its salience as an entity (how likely LLMs are to prioritize your brand and thought leadership).

We’ve developed two distinct scorecards:

  • Brand GEO Scorecard: Focused on your company’s overall digital footprint.
  • Author GEO Scorecard: Tailored to individual thought leaders, ensuring they’re recognized as credible experts online.

These tools don’t just identify gaps—they guide you toward better visibility, stronger authority, and long-term relevance in the AI-powered search landscape.

Using the GEO Scorecards

Next, let’s walk through the technical, content, and offsite elements that the scorecards evaluate, starting with the Brand GEO Scorecard.

Brand GEO Scorecard Criteria

The Brand GEO Scorecard’s criteria are broken down into three core categories and several subcategories, starting with technical, in-site elements:

In-Site GEO Criteria

In-Site Elements cover the technical elements and tags in your website that support its legibility to LLMs. This group includes:

  • Schema Markup: Bits of code that explicitly define the entities on your website and how they relate.
    • Organization schema directly tell search engines and LLMs that your brand is a particular type of organization. This markup should include additional properties that help more clearly define your brand as a reputable, real-world organization.
    • Content schema like Article, BlogPosting, and Report markups directly tell search engines and LLMs what the various pages on your website are. These markups should also include additional properties that lend the content extra credibility.
    • Other schema like FAQ and Product markups explicitly define other key elements of your content and offerings so that LLMs can accurately understand them.
    • Video schema helps ensure that any embedded videos on your website are properly understood and shared with users.
  • Metadata: Tags applied to individual web pages that explicitly define what they’re about.
    • Title tags and meta descriptions are the most important meta tags and should be present on all pages.
    • These tags should also adhere to length best practices to ensure maximum effectiveness.
  • Internal Linking: Links between the pages on your site that help clarify their purposes and subject matter to LLMs.
    • We use a proprietary site crawling tool to gauge the quality of internal link networks and identify improvements.

On-Site GEO Criteria

On-Site Content includes the quality, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of the material published on your website. This group includes:

  • Clear Brand Bio: A clearly articulated explanation of your brand, its offerings, value proposition, and more that LLMs can learn to associate with your brand name very closely.
    • A dedicated About page should serve as the central location for information about your brand and your clearly-written brand bio.
    • The brand name should be used consistently on your About page to reduce any confusion.
    • The brand bio should provide rich, meaningful details about the brand beyond slogans or vague phrases.
    •  The brand bio language should also be exactly repeated or closely echoed on other core pages across the website.
  • Social Proof and Authorship: Content on your website that demonstrates your real-world impact and reputability.
    • Social proof material should be used across the site to back up claims and reinforce the brand’s reputation.
    • Author bios should be published for all key staff to whom blog posts and thought leadership are attributed.
    • These author bios should include rich details that demonstrate real-world expertise.
    • The attributed authors should also be real people in your organization—use our Author Scorecard to bolster the entity strength of your brand’s key thought leaders.
  • Security and Compliance: The website should be technically secure and compliant to ensure trustworthiness.
    • HTTPS protocol is essential for maintaining trust and performance today.
    • Privacy policy and compliance statements also show LLMs and search engines that your brand is responsible, proactive, and trustworthy.
  • Content Quality: The content on your website must simply be worth sharing in order to gain traction in AI search results.
    • We use our own On-Site Content Scorecard to gauge the quality of content and identify actionable improvements.

Off-Site Visibility

Off-Site Visibility refers to all the ways that your brand is referenced on other websites and platforms, particularly those that LLMs are known to frequently reference when generating responses. This group includes:

  • Search Engine Presence: The brand should have a robust presence on multiple key search platforms.
    • An active Google Business Profile is among the most important places to directly provide up-to-date brand information to search engines and LLMs.
    • The Google Business Profile should include essential contact and description information as well as other rich details that further demonstrate the brand’s reputability.
    • The website should be indexed by Bing, which is the underlying search index used by ChatGPT.
    • Any critical errors flagged by Bing’s Search Console tools should also be resolved to ensure consistent visibility on that platform.
    • A presence on Wikipedia will further boost the brand’s visibility as a known entity in its space.
  • Social Media Presence: LLMs take note of social media platforms to inform their understandings of brands as active entities.
    • Social profiles should be linked directly from the brand’s website.
    • Social profiles should include consistent contact information.
    • LinkedIn is particularly important for business brands.
    • A brand’s LinkedIn profile should closely echo its core brand language, include rich details, link back to the website, and actively engage on the platform.
    • Any other brand social profiles should also clearly echo the brand’s core language and identity.
  • Industry/Network Presence: Brands should actively engage with other players and publications in their sectors to demonstrate authority and trustworthiness.
    • Brands should have active industry presences, which can take several forms.
    • Any official technology or marketing partners should link to the brand’s website.
    • Other industry peers, collaborators, and events should also link to the brand’s website.
    • Brands should ideally receive links from the top industry websites and publications that LLMs rely on to generate responses.

Author GEO Scorecard Criteria

The criteria in Author GEO Scorecards are broken down into two key categories and several subcategories.

On-Site Presence

On-Site Presence refers to how well-represented the author is on the brand’s website. This is where LLMs will first learn about the author as an entity and relate them to the brand.

  • Author Bio: Dedicated pages or sections of websites clearly labeled as author bios serve are the most effective tool for putting authors on the radar of LLMs.
    • The author needs a dedicated bio page with a unique URL.
    • The author bio should contain rich details that convey expertise and experience.
    • The author bio should ideally link out to one or more social profiles.
    • Author bio pages should include ProfilePage and Person schema markups to clearly explain their purpose to LLMs and search engines.
    • The Person markup should contain rich details that further enhance LLM’s understanding of the author as a distinct entity.
  • Attribution: Content on the brand’s website should be clearly attributed to the author as a thought leader.
    • Blog posts should be explicitly attributed to the author in a way that’s legible to both users and web crawlers.
    • The author should be listed on a meaningful number of blog posts to increase LLM awareness.
    • Author sections or bylines should link to dedicated author bio pages.
    • Blog posts should be reinforced with appropriate content schema to ensure LLMs understand their purposes.
    • The brand’s website should ideally allow readers to easily see all posts attributed to an author.

Off-Site Presence

An author’s Off-Site Presence demonstrates their position as a reputable (and cite-able) thought leader to LLMs and search engines.

  • Social Media Visibility: LLMs take note of social media platforms to inform their understandings of authors as active entities.
    • B2B authors should have dedicated LinkedIn profiles.
    • LinkedIn profiles should contain rich details that convey experience, link back to the brand’s website, and actively engage on the platform.
  • Industry/Network Visibility: Authors should be cited as active thought leaders on other relevant websites in their sector to prove their authoritativeness.
    • Brands should have active industry presences, which can take several forms.
    • Any branded guest articles published on other websites should clearly attribute the author.
    • The author bios provided to partner websites should clearly echo or repeat the author’s core bio on the brand’s website.

Generative AI and LLMs are reshaping the future of search. GEO scorecards provide a clear roadmap to ensure your brand—and its key voices—are prepared for this shift.

By improving both the legibility and salience of your organization or thought leaders as distinct entities, the scorecards will help you build lasting relevance in the AI-driven digital landscape. They should give you a clear structure for identifying improvements and laying out solutions.

Are you ready to optimize your digital presence for the generative era? Please contact your Nexus account manager to ask about assessing your AI readiness with our new tools.

Not yet a client? We’d love to hear from you! Drop us a line to tell us a bit about your digital marketing needs.