How to Improve AI Search Visibility: GEO Methodology, Citation Tracking & Live AI Retrieval

Introduction: AI Search Demand in the US

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

Welcome, Chandan from DoodleWeb. Thank you for joining us here on the NeuralAdX GEO & AI Search Strategy Podcast. Really pleased to see you. I understand you’re about eight hours behind us, so it’s about 7 a.m. your time, yeah?

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

7:40, yeah.

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

And you dragged yourself out of bed to have a podcast with me. What is wrong with you? You legend — I really appreciate it. I thought it would be interesting because over in America you had Google AI Mode earlier than us in the UK, so our listeners might be curious to get a brief grasp of the market there. How is it maturing? What have you noticed with clients or potential clients in terms of interest from businesses? Has it spiked or is it still slowly catching on?

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

Yeah, it’s a really hot topic in the US market. Everyone you speak to is interested in learning more about it. My current clients, previous clients — whenever we go through new requirements and mention that we are also doing AI search, they are really interested. We build custom websites for businesses, and I’ve personally been doing this for more than 12 years. Demand is very high because the buyer experience is changing.

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

People used to focus on traditional SEO, but now when you search on Google the AI experience can appear before the traditional organic results. That is the shift we are seeing, and people want to understand how we are going to address it. That is why we built our own internal tool, SiteSonar.

GEO Methodology: Measure, Diagnose, Fix & Re-Verify

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

Just to give this some structure: I appreciate the feedback on how the market is developing. My next question is about the methodology you implement for clients. Can you take me into that, particularly the SiteSonar software you use?

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

We work through a loop: measure, diagnose, fix and re-verify. A lot of tools tell you what to do, but the question is how you fix it and then re-verify it. We built something around measuring the result, diagnosing the gap, fixing it and checking again.

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

So if you have a website page that a client wants to perform better, what does the measurement stage actually do?

AI Citation Tracking: Prompts, Mentions & Competitor Positions

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

The first thing is prompt tracking. We build a set of real buyer-style questions for the market. For an agency, one example might be ‘best web agency in Seattle’.

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

High-commercial-intent questions.

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

Exactly. We run those questions against AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI. For each question we look at whether you are cited, whether you are mentioned, where you appear and who is cited instead.

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

So SiteSonar tracks that prompt against the client’s website and monitors how the site performs for that question — essentially AI citation tracking?

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

Yes.

Why Competitors Get Cited: Reverse-Engineering Winning Pages

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

Let’s say the client is being compared with four or five companies and is appearing fourth. You have established that through the measurement system. What do you then change so the AI engines have a better chance of surfacing the client for that prompt?

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

That is what we call diagnosis. We look at why you are not cited. For each tracked question where you are missing, we fetch the pages the AI engine actually cites and analyse them — their length, data points, page structure, headings, comparison tables, pricing information and other elements.

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

So essentially you are reverse-engineering the company that surfaced at the top, isolating the differences between its page and the client’s page, and then using those differences to improve the client’s opportunity to surface more prominently.

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

Exactly.

Technical GEO Fixes: Crawlers, Schema, llms.txt & Content Structure

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

We then connect that diagnosis to the resource hub. The content is drafted against the blueprint from the diagnosis. We look at technical gaps such as AI crawler access, robots.txt, llms.txt, schema and discovery or indexing signals such as IndexNow. On the content side we use answer-first structure, verifiable facts, FAQs, internal linking and brand/entity information. Drafts go through an approval queue before they are published.

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

After publication we re-test. We keep the question set fixed before and after so we can see whether the citation appeared or the position changed.

NeuralAdX 11-Factor GEO: Live AI Retrieval & Benchmarking

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

It is interesting to hear your methodology because there is a lot of correlation with ours. Our process uses the 11-Factor GEO Methodology, which draws from the Princeton GEO study and additional academic research that has come out since. When we take on a client we run high-intent commercial prompts through AI engines and observe the answers.

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

If the client is appearing below a competitor, we dig into the surfaced answer and citation chips to understand the source, information and structure behind the stronger result. We then improve the client page — not simply to copy what is there, but to advance the page where the evidence supports doing so.

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

We combine that first live AI retrieval assessment with ongoing AI Citation Benchmarking and AI Answer Visibility & Share of Voice measurement. We use the prescribed prompts, observe the feedback and, where performance drops or stalls against competitors, return to the answer and diagnose what needs to change. We then follow that with live AI retrieval testing. We publish examples of this process on our Proof GEO Works page.

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

Clients are really on top of it — they want to get cited. We also try to educate them using live search data and the questions people are actually asking, based on the business, its ideal customer profile, competitors and brand.

AI Search Testing: Visibility Indexes & Changing AI Engines

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

Do you do additional testing around AI search? At NeuralAdX we run the UK Business AI Visibility Index to see which companies surface in leading positions in particular sectors for high-intent commercial queries. We record and assess those results across Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Claude and Google Gemini.

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

The aim is to keep learning how each AI engine behaves, because the presentation and retrieval patterns can change. You have to stay current and observe those changes in real time. Do you have anything similar running or in the pipeline?

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

Yes. We are building a database around the differences we are seeing across businesses in the same industry so we can understand what is changing and what the leading results have in common.

Third-Party Citations, Directories & External Authority Signals

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

It is not one thing. You can create resources and answers on a website, but that alone does not mean you will immediately surface. There are third-party signals as well, including important directories that AI engines may use or cite.

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

We also have a listening radar that shows the engines where you are not cited and the directories where you are absent. That gives the business a list of places to review, register or improve where appropriate, and then come back and check again.

Closing: Continuous Testing as AI Search Changes

Chandan Sharma — Founder, DoodleWeb

We are building every day to understand what is being cited and how these AI engines are changing.

Paul Rowe — Founder, Chief Generative Engine Optimisation Officer & CEO, NeuralAdX Ltd

That’s great. We’ll pause it there and definitely come back to you in the future. I wanted this to be a relatively short introduction focused on one topic: the methodology and the ways we go about improving results for clients. Fundamentally, that is what clients listening care about. I’m glad we stayed mainly on that topic.