See What AI Actually Says About You. Measured, Not Guessed.
The free report tells you whether your site is built to be cited. This tells you whether it is - 25 category questions run across the four major AI platforms, three times each, and every source they cited instead of you, recorded.
It's also something more: your official day-0 baseline. Every improvement you ever make - with us or without us - gets measured against this document.
What is the GEO Baseline Report?
The GEO Baseline Report is a $99 measured assessment of how AI systems actually answer questions in a business's category. It runs 25 frozen category questions across the four major AI platforms in triplicate — 300 recorded answers — showing where the business appears, where it doesn't, and every competing source cited instead. It delivers a prioritized roadmap and registers the result as the site's formal day-0 baseline for measuring all future GEO work. It measures; it does not certify.
We analyze your site and your category, then run 25 frozen category questions across the four major AI platforms in triplicate - 300 measured answers showing where you appear, where you don't, and which platform is which.
For all 300 answers, the report records each source the AI cited instead of you - which sites, which pages, and for which questions. That dataset is the raw material for rebuilding your pages and generating new content built to be cited.
A prioritized set of actions you can start on right away - ordered by leverage, not by ease - to improve how you show up across those 300 answers.
Your results are entered into the GEO Certified™ program and stored as the reference point every future re-score is compared against. Without a baseline there is no before-and-after.
The Baseline Report opens the GEO Certified path, and everything that follows is measured against the baseline it establishes.
The $99 cost credits in full toward any GEO Certified service program.
A written report from a real human, no dashboard login, no call required.
Search changed shape. It used to hand people a list of links and let them choose. It now composes an answer and names a few sources. Everything below follows from that one shift.
- Ranking first no longer means getting the click. Ahrefs analyzed 300,000 keywords against Google Search Console data (May 2026) and found top-ranking pages now see a 58% lower clickthrough rate where an AI Overview appears - up from 34.5% eight months earlier. Position two lost about half its clicks; even position ten fell nearly 20%. Ranking is no longer the finish line. Being named in the answer is. Source
- AI reads your site whether or not it's ready to be read. GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot crawl continuously. They don't keep a penalty list - but when a model can't reconcile what your own pages say, or can't corroborate your claims anywhere else, it quietly cites a source it can verify instead. Ambiguity loses to clarity, and you never see it happen.
- Agents now do the shortlisting. "Find me the best provider for X" is increasingly asked of an AI agent rather than typed into a search box. The agent assembles a shortlist from what it can read, parse and verify. Your business is being evaluated inside a conversation you never see and never get to answer.
- AI may already be sending your buyers to a dead page. In one audit in this program, a page returning a server error was cited nine times by AI systems. Every one of those citations sent a prospective buyer to an error screen. AI keeps recommending what it learned, whether or not it still works.
- Your best page may be invisible to AI. AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. In another audit in this program, a brand's flagship technology page came back at 732 words for a human visitor and 16 words for an AI crawler. The page it most needed cited was, to AI, effectively blank.
- The cheapest advantage in your category is still unclaimed. Across 37 pages audited in one category - including the market leader's - not one carried structured data: the markup that tells a machine what you are, where you are and what you sell. The clearest signal available is being used by nobody.
- You can't improve what has never been measured. AI answers shift as models change. Without a recorded starting point there's no way to tell improvement from drift - or to prove that anything you did actually worked.
YMYL stands for "Your Money or Your Life." It's the label search engines apply to any page that could affect someone's health, safety, finances, or major life decisions - medical devices and treatments, clinics, supplements, legal and financial services, insurance, and anything a person could be harmed by getting wrong. If a bad decision based on your page could cost someone money or hurt them, you're in a YMYL category, whether or not anyone has ever told you so.
The practical effect is a higher bar. On ordinary topics an AI system will summarize a reasonable-looking page. On YMYL topics it becomes markedly more conservative: it favors sources it can corroborate, prefers named and credentialed authors, looks for citations to primary literature and a visible review date, and will often reach past a commercial site to an institutional one it trusts more. That's why so many health and finance answers name a hospital system, a .gov page, or a journal rather than the business that actually provides the service.
- The bar is higher, but so is the payoff. Most competitors in regulated categories never clear it - they publish marketing copy with no named author, no sources and no review date. Clearing the bar is a durable advantage precisely because it's inconvenient.
- Being uncitable is a business risk, not just a marketing one. When an AI system won't cite you on a question about your own product, it answers from somewhere else - a forum, a competitor, or an out-of-date page. You lose the sale and the definition of your own category at the same time.
- Is AI saying anything untrue about you? In a regulated category, an AI system overstating what your product does - or attaching a claim you never made - is a compliance exposure, not merely a marketing annoyance. You can't correct what you've never seen, and it won't appear in your analytics.
- Which authority is AI citing instead of you - and can you meet it? The report records every source cited across all 300 answers. In YMYL categories those sources are usually institutional, and knowing exactly which ones tells you what the evidentiary bar in your category actually is - the named authors, the citations, the review dates and the structured data you need in order to stand alongside them.
This report is built on two kinds of evidence, kept deliberately separate: peer-reviewed academic research into how generative engines choose what to cite, and VectorCertain's own measurement program, which tests those findings against live AI answers in real commercial categories.
The technology behind this report - the crawler, the readiness scoring model, and the measurement instrument used in the Baseline Report - is developed by VectorCertain LLC, which builds AI governance and measurement technology. Its founder has spent 25+ years building mission-critical AI systems, including work that contributed to AI-based monitoring being codified in federal environmental regulations.
LaunchHappy licenses that technology from VectorCertain and delivers it as the GEO Certified™ program. The same instrument, the same scoring model and the same frozen-question methodology are used on every engagement - which is what makes one client's score comparable to another's, and to its own results six months later.
More about the technology provider: vectorcertain.com
- Princeton University and IIT Delhi, ACM SIGKDD 2024. The founding academic study of generative engine optimization. The researchers built GEO-bench - 10,000 queries drawn from nine datasets across 25 domains - and tested nine content strategies against a generative engine. Adding citations, quotations and statistics raised source visibility by roughly 30-41%. Keyword stuffing, the classic search tactic, performed worse than making no changes at all. The findings were then reproduced on Perplexity, a live commercial engine. Funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation. DOI
- The finding that matters most for a challenger brand. In the same study, adding citations to sources raised visibility by 115% for a page ranked fifth, while the already top-ranked page lost visibility. Position in AI answers is not simply inherited from search rank - which is why a smaller, well-structured site can be cited ahead of a larger one.
- Ahrefs click-through study, May 2026. 300,000 keywords measured against Google Search Console data, establishing the scale of click loss where AI answers appear - the finding cited above. Source
- Depth and structure benchmark - 3,000 measured citations. Every page cited by AI for a fully-parameterized category leader was measured and characterized: median ~4,467 words, ~8 H2 headings, and - notably - zero structured data on any of the 49 cited pages. This is the benchmark your content depth and heading scores are measured against.
- Entity-type model - 474 measured citations. Across 300 measured AI answers, every citation was classified by page type. Five repeatable shapes accounted for the citations, and a plain-language entity-definition page was the single most-cited asset of all. This is the basis for the entity clarity score and for the most common recommendation in this report.
- Run on a fixed instrument, and re-runnable. Both studies were produced by the same measurement pipeline used in the Baseline Report, on a version-locked instrument. They are not survey results or industry commentary - they can be re-run and checked, which is why they're used here in preference to secondhand figures.
Benchmarks describe what was measured on other companies' cited pages. They are useful targets, not promises - structural similarity to cited pages is not a guarantee of citation.
Every rung uses the same ten criteria and the same weights - so upgrading never means starting over.
- 15 rapid checks
- Overall score band
- The headline issues
- Email delivery
Start here if you've never measured.
Get it free →- 25 frozen category questions
- 4 AI platforms
- 3 runs each - 300 measured answers
- Every competing citation recorded
- Prioritized roadmap
- Registered day-0 baseline
- Credits in full toward any GEO Certified service program
Start here if you're planning work - ours or anyone's - and want it measured.
Get your baseline →- The full baseline measurement
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Start here if you already know you're heading toward certification.
Audit details →The free report and the audit measure your site. The Baseline Report measures the answers. Most sites that certify have done both - and the Baseline Report is the one that tells you whether any of it worked.
It is not certification. GEO Certified™ status is earned by work that's verified through certification review - if you've done the work yourself and want it verified and certified, that's the $149 Re-Score, a different product built for exactly that. This report tells you exactly what AI says about you across 25 frozen questions and four AI platforms; it doesn't award the badge, whatever it finds.
It is not a promise of citations or rankings. We measure what AI actually answers, today, across four platforms - that's what we record. Answer engines decide what they cite; nobody controls that, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing with your money.
It is not a sales document in disguise. If AI is already citing you well across those 300 measured answers, the report says so, and we'll tell you what not to buy. The measurement is the product; the honesty is the brand.
Order the report and reply to your receipt with your site URL - takes one minute, no forms, no calls.
We build your question set - 25 category questions, frozen so every run is measured against the same standard, not a moving target.
We run the measurement - all 25 questions across four AI platforms, three times each, recording all 300 answers and every competing citation.
Your report arrives by email in 3-5 business days - the full 300-answer measurement, every competing citation, a prioritized roadmap, and your baseline registered on our side for any future re-score.
How is this different from the free report? ›
The free report is 15 rapid checks and an overall score band - a smoke detector. The Baseline Report is the full instrument: 25 frozen category questions run across four AI platforms in triplicate - 300 measured answers, every competing citation recorded, and a prioritized roadmap - registered as your official day-0 baseline.
How is this different from the $249 Certification Audit? ›
The audit contains everything in the Baseline Report and goes to certification depth: a 250-point inspection, the Certification Gap Report mapping your exact path to 90+, and an expert video walkthrough - plus the audit fee credits toward any package for 90 days. If you already know you're heading toward certification, skip straight to the audit.
Which four AI platforms do you measure? ›
[Name them here - see Implementation Note 4.]
Are the 25 questions specific to my business, or generic? ›
They're built for your category, not generic templates - the kind of questions a real buyer asks an AI system before choosing a provider like you. Once built, they're frozen for your account, so every future run is measured against the exact same standard, not a moving target.
Does being cited well mean my site is GEO Certified™? ›
No. Certification is earned through certification review, never sold - this report measures what AI says today, it doesn't certify. If your own work meets the standard, the $149 Re-Score verifies it and issues certification.
Can I fix things myself from this report? ›
Yes - that's the point of measuring against a published standard. The report shows you exactly which competing citations beat you and on which questions, the underlying GEO Certified™ standard is public, and the Re-Score exists to certify DIY work that gets there.
Can I re-run it later to see progress? ›
Yes. Any later re-score runs the same 25 frozen questions against your registered baseline, so the before/after is real - identical questions, identical platforms, different dates.
What exactly do I receive - a PDF, a call, a dashboard login? ›
A written report, delivered by email from a real human, in 3-5 business days. No dashboard login, no call required - though if you want to talk through the results, you're welcome to reach out.
What if AI already cites me well? ›
Then the report says so, plainly, and tells you what not to spend money on. About the strongest thing we can put here: we'd rather be your measuring stick than your invoice.
$99 credits in full toward any GEO Certified service program.