GEO score and metrics

Understand the Cleo GEO Score, its component metrics, trends, and measurement precision.

The GEO Score summarizes how strongly your brand appears across the AI engines and prompts Cleo tracks for a site. Use it to follow direction over time, then open the supporting metrics to understand why it moved.

The score components

Metric	What it answers
AI Presence Rate	How often does an engine mention your brand?
Answer Prominence	How early or visibly does the brand appear in the answer?
Citation Rank Index	How strongly does your site rank among cited sources?
Share of Voice	What share of relevant brand mentions belongs to you rather than competitors?
Recommendation Rate	How often is the brand recommended, not merely named?
Sentiment Score	Is the brand described positively, neutrally, or negatively?

The composite GEO Score combines these performance dimensions. Citation Drift and Measurement Precision sit beside the score because they describe stability and confidence rather than brand performance.

Read trends correctly

• Compare weeks and months, not isolated runs.
• Check the engine and prompt breakdown before assigning a cause.
• Use the same tracked prompt wording if you want a continuous history.
• Expect wider uncertainty when a site has little data or few tracked prompts.
• Treat a sudden jump as a reason to inspect the evidence, not as proof of durable improvement.

What can move the score

The score may change when:

• Your pages become easier to retrieve, understand, or cite.
• Third-party sources begin mentioning or validating your brand.
• A competitor gains or loses visibility.
• An AI engine changes its answer or source selection.
• Cleo adds new valid data for a tracked prompt.
• You add, edit, retire, or rebalance tracked prompts.

Use What moved your score? and per-engine views when available. They provide more useful context than the composite number alone.

Measurement precision

AI answers are not deterministic. Cleo reports sample size and confidence information so you can separate a meaningful change from ordinary variation. Precision generally improves as more scheduled runs accumulate.

Do not promise a client a precise business outcome from a small score movement. Pair GEO trends with citation evidence, analytics, and completed work.