AEO Industry Index | AI Search Visibility
Track how often your brand is cited, recommended, and ranked by every major AI engine, measured weekly against your full competitive set. Know where you stand before your customers stop searching the traditional way.
Traditional SEO measured position 1 through 10. AI search doesn't show a ranked list of links; it generates an answer. If your brand isn't named in that answer, you don't exist for that query. There is no position 2.
The challenge is that AI citation patterns are not derivable from SERP rank. The AEO Index measures them directly.
AI Platform Comparison
| Platform | Answer Format | Citation Pattern | Brand Visibility Factor |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT (GPT-4o) | Narrative synthesis | Sources listed when Browse enabled | Entity recognition + training data |
| Perplexity | Structured with inline citations | Real-time web + source links | Domain authority + freshness |
| Google AI Overviews | Snippet expansion | Featured source cards | E-E-A-T + structured data |
| Claude (Anthropic) | Direct prose answers | Knowledge cutoff dependent | Training corpus coverage |
SERP rank no longer predicts AI visibility. A brand ranked 8th organically can dominate AI answers if its content is structured correctly. Measuring one without the other is incomplete.
These are not the same surface. A brand that appears in AI Overviews is not automatically cited in AI Mode, and vice versa. Each requires its own measurement and its own strategy.
Pages not updated in 90 days receive 3x fewer AI citations than pages refreshed within 30 days. The Index tracks which of your tracked entities are vulnerable to freshness decay.
Every measurement decision is documented. Every prompt is entity-agnostic. Every score is reproducible from the underlying response data.
50 to 64 prompts are designed without any brand names; the AI decides who to mention. Prompts span six buyer journey categories to ensure representative coverage of how real users discover brands.
All 5 platforms are queried with identical standardized system prompts and temperature set to 0.3, ensuring cross-platform differences reflect platform behavior, not measurement variance.
Every response is parsed for entity mentions. Position in list, mention count, category coverage, and response type (list vs. narrative) are all captured per entity per platform per prompt.
Five metrics are weighted into a composite score for each entity. The output is a 21-slide interactive HTML report with trend data, a content gap matrix, and prioritized recommendations.
Each metric measures a distinct dimension of AI visibility. No two metrics are correlated by construction. The composite captures frequency, breadth, authority, advocacy, and durability, all independently.
Every AEO Index report is an interactive HTML file, filterable, navigable, and shareable without any login. Your team can drill into any entity, any platform, any week without needing access to a separate dashboard.
Reports are generated automatically each week and delivered alongside a written interpretation layer from Arcalea's measurement team. The data tells you what happened. The interpretation tells you what to do about it.
Every scoring decision is documented. Every prompt is published with the report. Every known limitation (bootstrap CI methodology, list vs. narrative position handling, minimum mention thresholds) is disclosed explicitly in the Known Limitations slide.
These benchmarks run automatically every week. If your industry is among them, you can access a current competitive snapshot immediately. If not, Arcalea can configure a new vertical in under two weeks.
A single composite score masks the platform-level story. A brand dominant on ChatGPT but absent from Perplexity has a different problem than one visible everywhere but never first. The AEO Index shows the full breakdown. New to the discipline? See our guide to Answer Engine Optimization.
AI engines don't rank pages. They recommend brands. The Index measures which brands they recommend, and why.
Understand the mechanics of AI search, then see the other Measure lane platforms that turn visibility into revenue.
How generative engines are restructuring search and what brands need to do to stay visible.
Read article →The specific signals that determine whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI cite your brand.
Read article →How AI agents are replacing search for transactional queries and what readiness looks like.
Read article →Multi-touch attribution that closes the loop between every channel and closed revenue.
Explore →Search intelligence that converts organic rankings into dollar-denominated financial terms.
Explore →Quantitative market assessment. Validate opportunity size before committing budget.
Explore →The AEO Index tracks AI visibility on an ongoing basis. Compass provides the organic competitive baseline it builds on. Galileo connects the full picture to revenue. Together they give you a measurement system with no blind spots.
The AEO Industry Index is Arcalea’s AI search visibility measurement platform. It sends standardized, entity-agnostic prompts to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot weekly, extracts brand mentions from every response, and scores entities on a five-metric composite model. The output shows which brands are winning in AI search and why.
The AEO Index powers Arcalea's SEO, AEO & GEO service.
Arcalea sends 50 to 64 standardized prompts to each AI platform per weekly run. Prompts never contain brand names; the AI decides who to mention. Mentions are scored on five metrics: Entity Mention Frequency (25 percent), Category Breadth (20 percent), Position Power (20 percent), Platform Consistency (20 percent), and First-Position Rate (15 percent).
The AEO Industry Index tracks ChatGPT (OpenAI GPT-4o), Perplexity AI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Microsoft Copilot. All five platforms are collected weekly with standardized system prompts and temperature settings to ensure cross-platform comparability.
Each AEO Index report is a 21-slide interactive HTML report with a composite index leaderboard, platform-by-platform breakdown, mention trend analysis, category coverage gaps, content gap keyword matrix, and prioritized recommendations. Reports are delivered weekly and maintained longitudinally for trend tracking.
Yes. Arcalea configures the Index for any competitive landscape by building a custom prompt library spanning six buyer journey categories: Discovery, Comparison, Solution-Seeking, Educational, Community, and Decision. Active verticals include executive education, egg donation and surrogacy, commercial debt collection, and wholesale electrical supply.
If Arcalea is already running an AEO Index in your industry, a current competitive snapshot is available within days. If not, Arcalea scopes a new vertical configuration with custom prompts tailored to your buyer journey and competitive set, then begins weekly collection and reporting.