Answers
The AI-visibility questions people actually ask
Direct answers, written to be quoted — including where the honest answer is “nobody has confirmed that yet”.
- How do I check if my website appears in ChatGPT?Ask ChatGPT the questions your buyers actually ask — not your brand name — and record whether your brand is named, cited or recommended in the answer. Because the model's output is probabilistic, one query proves nothing: ask each question several times and count how often you appear. That rate, with a confidence interval around it, is your real ChatGPT visibility. GeoMagics automates exactly this: it samples each question multiple times across ChatGPT and the other engines and reports the rate with its uncertainty, so a lucky answer is never mistaken for a trend.
- GEO vs SEO — what is the difference?SEO optimizes for a ranked position in a list of links; GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) optimizes for being named, cited and recommended INSIDE the answer an AI engine writes. They share a foundation — crawlable, fast, unambiguous, well-structured content — but they diverge in what counts as success and in how you verify it: a rank is a stable position you can look up, while an AI answer is probabilistic and must be sampled repeatedly to be measured honestly. GEO does not replace SEO; it adds a second surface where the same technical hygiene pays off differently.
- Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor instead of me?Usually for one of four reasons: the engine cannot resolve you as a clear entity, nothing independent corroborates what you claim about yourself, your content is not extractable in the form the engine needs, or your competitor is simply present in more of the sources the engine consults for that question. None of these is fixed by writing more marketing copy about yourself — they are fixed by becoming machine-resolvable, being corroborated by third parties, and publishing content that answers the actual question better than the alternatives.
- Does llms.txt actually work?There is no published confirmation from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google that they consume llms.txt, so anyone promising ranking lift from it is overclaiming. It is still worth adding, for a different reason: it is cheap, it cannot hurt, some tools do read it, and writing one forces you to state — in machine-readable form — what your site is and which pages matter. Treat it as hygiene and entity clarity, not as a ranking lever.
- How often should I measure AI visibility?Sampling depth matters more than calendar frequency. For a given question, several repeats in one session tell you more than one run per day for a week, because run-to-run variance is what you are trying to see through. A practical shape: enough repeats per question that the interval around your rate is narrower than the change you care about, a weekly cadence for trend, and always a re-measure immediately before and after a change you want to attribute.
- How do I see how much traffic comes from ChatGPT and Perplexity?Some of it is visible and some of it structurally is not. Clicks that carry a referrer from an AI product show up as referral traffic in your analytics and can be segmented there. But a large share of AI influence leaves no referral at all: the user reads the answer and never clicks, or arrives later by typing your name — landing as direct or branded search. The honest approach measures both sides: the AI referrals you can attribute, and separately how often the engines mention you at all.