Measuring GEO Visibility: Prompt Corpora Define the Answer Market

Abstract

GEO (generative engine optimization) visibility scores aggregate source appearances, citations, or brand mentions in generated answers. The prompt corpus selects the situations evaluated, while weights determine their relative importance. Together they define an "answer market" that need not represent actual user demand. Prompt wording can alter retrieval, competing sources, and generated answers. Scoring then requires identifying the appearances, citations, or mentions of interest. If a language model performs this task, its instruction can change the score assigned to an unchanged answer. Our critical survey examines how these choices help define what a GEO score measures. It draws on research into whether indicators measure the intended phenomenon, total survey error, and information retrieval evaluation. The framework specifies situation annotation, prompt formulations, execution conditions, weights, and scoring rules. When weights are unknown or remain to be chosen, the framework reports sets of admissible scores. It distinguishes values compatible with data and assumptions about a target population (partial identification) from variation across weighting conventions (normative sensitivity). A citation alone does not establish a source's contribution. The article defines a comparison of answers generated with and without a source in a controlled documentary context, distinct from an intervention on the full engine with competing sources. The framework is supported by reproducible calculations. No new experiments are reported; its general empirical validity remains to be assessed.