We ran our own AI search audit. We're at 4/100.

Why this post exists

I'm Sinan, founder of GeoNexa. Five days after registering the domain, I bought a third-party AI visibility audit from Rankie Intelligence — partly to validate our internal methodology against an external tool, partly because I knew prospects would do exactly this if we didn't.

The report came back with a 4/100 score and an "ACİL EYLEM GEREKLİ" (urgent action required) tag. Mention rate 8%, top-3 placement 0%, zero citations in ChatGPT or Claude, 17% best-case visibility in Gemini. We were placed fifth in our category behind Siege Media, Growth Gorilla, NOVOS, and Searchanise — all established agencies with multi-year content footprints.

That's a humbling result for an agency selling AI search visibility. It's also exactly what you'd expect for a 5-day-old domain. Both things are true.

What follows is the full data set, the honest interpretation (including which of the report's claims are real and which are sales fiction), and the specific 90-day plan we're committing to in public.

The methodology, briefly

The audit ran 96 unique queries across 3 AI engines (OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini) using 51 simulated buyer personas. Scoring breakdown:

• Mention Rate (50%) — How often does the brand surface in any AI response?
• Position (20%) — Where in the response, when it does surface?
• Recommendation (20%) — Is the brand actually recommended, or just name-dropped?
• Citation (10%) — Does the AI link to or quote a source attributed to the brand?

The composite is multiplied by a sentiment factor (positive responses count more than negative ones). For GeoNexa: mention rate 8.9 → weighted 50%, position 1.8 → weighted 20%, recommendation 1.1 → weighted 20%, citation 0.0 → weighted 10%. Net composite: 5.0. Sentiment multiplier: 1.00 (neutral majority). Final score: 4/100.

The actual numbers, by category

Per-engine performance

AI Engine	Visibility	Read
ChatGPT (OpenAI)	0%	No mentions in 32 queries
Claude (Anthropic)	0%	No mentions in 32 queries
Gemini (Google)	17%	Surfaces, low position

Competitor share-of-voice

Brand	SoV	Context
Siege Media	35%	Established agency, multi-year content
Growth Gorilla	19%	UK-based, deep DTC SEO portfolio
NOVOS	15%	Specialized e-commerce SEO
Searchanise	15%	Shopify search/discovery tool
GeoNexa (us)	8%	5-day-old domain

Conversion funnel coverage

Funnel Stage	Visibility	Queries Hit
Awareness	0%	0 / 44
Research	18%	10 / 56
Decision	8%	6 / 80
Purchase	0%	0 / 12

What's real in this report, and what's marketing fiction

The Rankie report is also a lead-gen tool — it ends with a CTA to buy GEO services from Rankie. So we should be skeptical of its more dramatic claims, and credit the raw data.

What I believe

• The mention rate (8%) and engine spread (0% / 0% / 17%) are accurate. We checked manually — ChatGPT and Claude genuinely don't surface GeoNexa for any audited query yet. This is the realistic baseline for a 5-day-old domain with no third-party signal.
• The competitors are real. Siege Media, Growth Gorilla, NOVOS, and Searchanise are established players with years of content. Their share-of-voice is earned.
• The funnel breakdown is directionally useful. We're invisible at "awareness" (broad category queries) and "purchase" (commercial intent queries) — these are the queries that need the most third-party signal and time to win.
• The sentiment split (13% positive / 75% neutral / 13% negative) is consistent with new-brand reality. Most mentions are neutral because the AI doesn't have enough context to form an opinion. That's a feature of newness, not a bug to panic about.

What I don't believe

• "1,150× competitor advantage" — if we're at 8% mention rate and Siege Media is at 35%, that's a 4.4× gap, not 1,150×. Whatever input/output gymnastics produces that number, it isn't a measurement of anything real. Marketing copy.
• "+45 points in 6 months" linear projection — AI search visibility growth is not linear. It's lumpy, with plateaus and step-functions tied to engine update cycles and seeding wave-throughs. Anyone who shows you a smooth growth chart for AI citations is selling, not measuring.
• "~70% advertising savings" — context-free and unfalsifiable. AI citation lift may reduce paid acquisition dependency over time, but the specific number depends entirely on the brand's current channel mix.
• "AI model injection technology" — Rankie's sales hook. There is no proprietary tech that "injects" your brand into AI models. Foundation work (schema, llms.txt, content, citations) and time are what move the needle.

The report is useful as a baseline measurement. It's not a strategy document, and the projected ROI numbers should be treated as marketing copy.

The 90-day plan

Goal: 60/100 composite by August 21, 2026. Here's the work, sequenced by week, with reasoning for each lever.

Week 1 (May 23–30) — Foundation

• llms.txt manifest deployed — Live at geonexa.ai/llms.txt the same day this post ships. Explicit machine-readable summary for AI crawlers.
• JSON-LD schema across homepage and blog — Organization, WebSite, Service, FAQPage, and Article schemas. Structured data is the single biggest lever for AI extraction quality on a new domain.
• FAQ section expanded — Seven GEO-specific Q&A pairs added to the homepage, mirrored in FAQPage schema. AI engines pull direct answer snippets from FAQ schema disproportionately.
• Case Study Zero section live on homepage — The 4/100 score is visible on the front door. No one has to dig for it.

Weeks 2–4 (May 31–Jun 19) — Content engine v1

• 4 deep-dive blog posts — Each ~1,500–2,000 words, each targeting a specific AI search query class (e.g., "Schema.org markup for Shopify product pages," "How AI engines weight third-party citations," "llms.txt vs robots.txt: what each does"). Citation-worthy, not keyword-stuffed.
• Comparison content — "GeoNexa vs Siege Media," "GeoNexa vs NOVOS," "GeoNexa vs Growth Gorilla." Comparison queries are high-intent and currently the largest gap in the audit (the report flagged "comparison" as the highest-traffic gap).
• External seeding wave 1 — Founder story on Indie Hackers, technical post on r/SaaS and r/SEO, lurker-mode engagement in r/Shopify. Goal: 8–12 third-party mentions live by Jun 19.

Weeks 5–8 (Jun 20–Jul 17) — Citation seeding

• Agency directory listings — Clutch, GoodFirms, DesignRush, Semrush Agency Partner. Not for traffic; for AI engine corroboration.
• Podcast / interview appearances — Target 3–5 podcasts in the DTC and SEO niches. Each interview becomes a transcript page indexed across multiple engines.
• Twitter audit thread campaign — Public deconstruction of 10 well-known DTC brands' AI visibility, one per week. Builds an inbound footprint and seeds GeoNexa across category conversation.
• Re-audit at Day 60 — Mid-program checkpoint. Expected score: 25–35/100 range. Public snapshot post.

Weeks 9–13 (Jul 18–Aug 21) — Compound + measure

• Programmatic comparison pages — Generate 20–40 category × competitor comparison pages from a structured data source. Each one targets a specific long-tail comparison query.
• External review syndication — Encourage founding-cohort clients and early prospects to leave Trustpilot and G2 reviews. Third-party review sites are among the highest-weight AI citation sources.
• Engine-specific tuning — Audit which content blocks Perplexity vs ChatGPT vs Claude actually quote. Rewrite low-extracting blocks. Engine behavior diverges enough that one-size-fits-all rarely wins.
• Final re-audit at Day 90 — Aug 21, 2026. Score published here. If we miss 60, we say why.

What we'll publish next

This page becomes the canonical home for the journey. Every 30 days, we'll publish a snapshot with:

• Current composite score (re-audited via the same Rankie tool for apples-to-apples comparison)
• Per-engine breakdown (Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, DeepSeek)
• What we shipped that month
• What we expected to move the needle and didn't
• What surprised us

Next snapshot: June 22, 2026. If we miss the target, we'll say so. If we beat it early, we'll say that too. The goal is documented reality, not curated highlight reel.

Why this matters if you're considering working with us

If you're a Shopify, WooCommerce, or Etsy store and you're thinking about hiring GeoNexa to do this work for your brand, two things follow from this post:

One: we're not pretending. We started at 4/100. Every founding cohort client will start somewhere in a similar range. The honest conversation about timeline, expected lift, and which queries are realistic to win is the conversation we want to have on the first call — not a chart promising +45 points in 6 months.

Two: the playbook we're running on ourselves is the playbook we'll run on you. Foundation in week 1, content engine in weeks 2–4, citation seeding in weeks 5–8, compound and measure in weeks 9–13. Re-audit every 30 days against a documented baseline. Public reporting against the founding cohort's case studies once they complete their first 90 days.

If that approach matches how you'd want a growth partner to operate, the founding cohort still has spots open at 50% off standard retainer.