What does the ApexGEO score measure?

The ApexGEO score is a weighted-sum measure of brand visibility across AI search engines, combining citation count, share of model, sentiment, source authority, and content freshness into a 0–100 figure.

Are the weights here the same as production?

No. The weights on /what-is-apexgeo are illustrative and stable across changes to the real engine. Production scoring adapts per-industry and per-engine.

Which engines does ApexGEO sweep?

Core engines monitored today: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Google AI Overviews. Further engines (Copilot, Cohere, Mistral, Llama, Qwen) are on the roadmap.

What does a score of 60 mean?

A score of 60 in the illustrative model means the brand averages strong on freshness and sentiment, moderate on citation count, and below-average on share of model and source authority — typical for an early-stage brand with credible content but limited backlink coverage.

How often does the score update?

Tracked prompts run weekly by default, with higher-frequency monitoring available as a paid add-on. The score recomputes whenever new prompt-tracking results land.

Can the score be gamed?

Source authority and share of model are slow-moving and hard to fake. Citation count and freshness can be improved through legitimate publishing and indexing work, which is the goal.

What is ApexGEO? — The Methodology Behind the Score

The two scores, defined

ApexGEO reports two distinct 0–100 scores. They answer different questions, so the vocabulary is anchored here once; the rest of this page details the first.

AI Visibility: How often and how accurately AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Google AI Overviews — cite your brand, scored 0–100 from the five citation signals this page describes: citation count, share of model, sentiment, source authority, and freshness. The dashboard surfaces it as AI Visibility, or AI mention strength.
Digital Presence Score: A separate 0–100 audit score that combines five optimization dimensions — SEO, GEO (generative-engine), AEO (answer-engine), SMO (social), and PPO (people and thought leadership) — into one graded figure. AI Visibility answers whether AI engines are citing you today; the Digital Presence Score answers how optimized your whole footprint is.

What ApexGEO measures

ApexGEO sweeps 7 core AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Google AI Overviews — with category-relevant prompts and records every brand citation. The resulting input vector feeds five axes: citation count, share of model, sentiment, source authority, freshness.

ApexGEO score (illustrative)

60

Citation count35% × 64
How often AI engines cite the brand in responses.
Share of Model25% × 48
How often the brand is cited relative to competitors.
Sentiment15% × 72
Whether citations describe the brand positively.
Source authority15% × 41
Whether AI engines treat the brand's site as a trusted source.
Freshness10% × 87
How recent the brand's tracked content is.

Illustrative weighting — production scoring uses a richer model that adapts per-industry and per-engine.

How the score is computed

Each input is mapped to a 0–100 scale. The score is a weighted sum where the weights sum to 1. Production weights adapt per-industry and per-engine; the illustrative model uses fixed weights so the page teaches the concept without coupling to the live algorithm.

Why each input matters

Citation count — raw discoverability.
Share of Model — category dominance.
Sentiment — citation quality.
Source authority — third-party trust signals.
Freshness — recency.

How the score reacts to changes

In the illustrative model, lifting source authority from 41 to 80 with default weights moves the score from 60 to 66. Lifting citation count from 64 to 90 moves the score from 60 to 69. The slider behavior above demonstrates how the score responds when you reweight inputs.

What the score is not

The ApexGEO score is not a guarantee of citation in any specific AI engine response. It is not a substitute for traditional SEO ranking metrics. It does not measure conversion or revenue attribution. It captures visibility, not outcome.

Beyond the score: grounding, traffic, and crawlers

The visibility score is one layer. ApexGEO now grounds monitoring in real web search on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok, so a citation reflects what the engine actually retrieved rather than what it recalls from training. Presence is reported honestly as named ÷ measured, and the ghost-citation gap — where an engine pulls your content without naming the brand — is tracked separately so it never inflates the headline number.

Two adjacent signals close the loop. A Google Search Console integration places daily organic traffic beside the AI-visibility timeline and correlates the two, so you can see when AI presence and organic clicks move together. And LLM crawler analytics show which AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and more — actually fetch your pages, with each request's source IP verified against the operator's published ranges to flag spoofed bots.

How to improve it

ApexGEO ships a recommendation engine that ranks fixes by expected score impact. See the ApexGEO self-audit case study for a worked example.

Built by Brightsphere Technologies

ApexGEO is a Brightsphere Technologies product. For the builder-side case study and broader AI-native software context, read the Brightsphere ApexGEO case study and the Brightsphere Technologies entity page.