Do GEO/AI Visibility Platforms/Tools Matter? Help Me Find Out. (An industry wide survey.)
I need YOUR help with this survey. (Please take it, and share it!)
TL;DR to get straight to the heart of this post:
My survey is 17 questions, takes less than 5 minutes, and is anonymous.
It runs from July 14 to 27.
Aiming for 1,000 responses and I’ll need your help to get there! Please share!
No pitch, no followup because I’m not collecting emails, just answers.
Results published on Duane Forrester Decodes in August 2026. Survey link
Up front I’ll state that I built one of these platforms. Mine launched at the end of May, and I spent the prior eighteen months of my life building it. That means I have skin in the game on the questions I’m asking. I’m clarifying that up front, because the whole point of what follows depends on you trusting that I’m asking honestly.
Here’s it is in a nutshell: Do platforms that track how AI systems cite, mention, paraphrase, or omit your content actually matter to the people doing this work? Do practitioners value them? Are they worth paying for? Are they solving a real problem, or a problem that only vendors like me think exists?
I have opinions, obviously. I think the answer will be yes, and I think it will be more clearly yes eighteen months from now than it is today. I have lived through enough category births to know what one looks like when it’s early, and this one feels early to me (in a familiar way). But feelings are not data, and my read on the space is not neutral. Yours might be.
So I am asking. All of you. Whether you use my platform, a competitor’s, none of them, or think the whole category is premature and over-hyped, I want to hear from you. The skeptics are the group I want to hear from most, actually, because they could be the ones with the most useful information about where this work does and does not deliver.
I am trying to get at least 1,000 responses for this survey, so please, I’m genuinely asking, share this with as many people as you can to help me. I help people daily, and I’m asking for your help with this.
(Survey link: https://forms.gle/3GBTNRW9KVPf6PRz5 )
Now, here is what got me to the point building this survey.
Everyone in this space is quiet. Publicly, every vendor is winning. Privately, nobody I have talked to has a clear picture of whether the category is healthy, growing, plateauing, or all three at once in different segments. One of the larger companies in the space, well-funded, well-known, recently told me they had 200-plus new accounts in their best month (they claimed). Whether that is a triumph or a warning sign depends on other numbers they did not share with me, and probably would not share with anyone. Meanwhile, I hear from smaller companies that they are growing steadily, and from others that they are barely growing at all. There is no shared read.
And I don’t see anyone openly asking practitioners what they actually think. Vendors are asking their own customers, which tells you almost nothing about the broader market. Analysts are writing category reports based on vendor interviews, which tells you what vendors want to be true. The people doing the work every day, in-house SEOs and marketers, agencies serving clients, independent consultants, are the group whose opinion would answer the question, and that is the group nobody is polling directly, as far as I can see, in a dedicated way.
So this is the survey. Seventeen questions, under five minutes, fully anonymous. I am asking about your current approach, what data you actually value in your decisions, how you weigh a vendor, and what you think is reasonable to pay for these services. There is no request at the end. There is no pitch. There is not a single product mention inside the survey (my own or others), because I want to keep the data clean. And I’m not adding anyone to a mailing list for follow-up, because I’m not collecting emails. This is about learning. This is not about SEO (we have that data), it’s about GEO/AEO, AIO, whatever you want to call our new workstream.
The results will be published here on my Substack in the weeks after the survey closes. That piece will include the story of building my platform and what the data tells me about whether I was right to do it. That is the deal, transparently. You give the industry an honest read, and I use my platform to publish it.
The survey runs for fourteen days. (From July 14 – 27th) Take it here: https://forms.gle/3GBTNRW9KVPf6PRz5
If you know practitioners who should weigh in, please forward this to them. The more responses this gets, the more useful the picture, and the harder it is for any of us, myself included, to hide behind our own assumptions.
Thank you,
Duane
You left out the biggest question of all. Do you think that currently, you can accurately and reliably check brand mentions and track them over time? My answer is no.
These three biggest problems.
The “Segment of One”: Modern AI uses “dynamic profiles” that update in real-time based on the user’s browsing behavior, scroll depth, and even device type. This makes a single “rank” or “mention score” for a brand technically impossible to standardize. This is not like SEO or ranking in Google where there is actually a database to draw from. The difference between measuring AI visibility and Google rankings could not be further apart.
Synthetic Data Problem: Tools like Semrush and Nightwatch mostly rely on synthetic queries.These are automated bots asking a fixed set of questions via API. These bots do not have the user’s context, history, hobbies, or professional, which is why their “visibility scores” mostly differ from what real users see.
The “Transparency” Gap: OpenAI, Google, Anthropic & Perplexity AI do not provide analytics APIs for brand mentions. Until they do, any tool claiming to “track” mentions is effectively using “directional surveillance” or simulations rather than hard data.
So a lot of my questions on that survey are applying to where we are right now. No I'm not going to pay a lot for a tool that can't reliably track brand mentions. We don't have that data yet.
My problem isn't that people are trying to build it and who are informing people the limits of that data they are providing. But those that are selling it as an absolute that you can track brand mentions, I believe are either being misleading or don't actually understand the tool they created.