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For two decades, marketers optimized for search. Keywords, backlinks, and snippets determined who was found — and who disappeared.
But in 2025, discovery moved somewhere else entirely.
When people ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini which brand to trust, the model doesn’t just pull from Google’s index. It recalls from memory — a compressed reflection of what it has learned from years of web data, news, reviews, and social signals.
That shift raises a new, existential question for every brand:
Does the model remember you?
From SEO to GEO
Search Engine Optimization was about visibility in queries.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is about visibility in conversation.
While SEO trained algorithms to rank, GEO trains language models to recall — to weave your brand into their natural reasoning patterns.
Traditional analytics tell you traffic, clicks, or rankings.
But they don’t tell you if you’re encoded in AI memory — the invisible layer that shapes answers, recommendations, and perceptions.
That’s where GEO Forensics™ comes in.
What is GEO Forensics™?
GEO Forensics™ is the first structured method for auditing brand presence inside large language models.
It’s not about prompt tricks or vanity searches.
It’s a forensic framework — a repeatable research process that uncovers:
- 🧭 Brand Recall:
Whether the model remembers your brand internally or retrieves it from the web. - 🔍 Context & Positioning:
How it describes you — tone, adjectives, and associations. - ⚔️ Competitive Visibility:
Who else appears when users ask for solutions like yours. - 🧠 Source & Retrieval Diagnostics:
Where your brand data comes from (Wikipedia? News? Blog posts?). - 📊 Sentiment & Topic Mapping:
What emotional and thematic patterns the model attaches to your name.
Each category contains a set of research-grade prompts — 60 in total — designed to test how deep your brand runs through the LLM’s neural layers.
Why brand memory matters
When users ask ChatGPT “What’s the best app for fleet tracking?” or “Which platform helps manage mobile workers?”, the model draws from what it remembers to craft an answer.
If your brand isn’t in that recall layer, you’ll never appear no matter how much you spend on ads or SEO.
That’s the new frontier of brand equity: being remembered by the model, not just the market.
In a world where AI assistants guide buying decisions, memory is market share.
Inside the methodology
Each GEO Forensics test produces:
- A Brand Recall Index (0–100) showing how often and how accurately the model recalls you.
- A Visibility Heatmap comparing your presence to competitors.
- A Source Breakdown that reveals which publications feed your AI footprint.
- A Sentiment Graph tracking how positively or negatively you’re described.
Together, these outputs form a Brand Memory Report — the modern equivalent of an SEO audit, reimagined for LLMs.
The implications for marketers
This isn’t just about vanity metrics.
It’s about strategic positioning in an AI-mediated world:
- PR teams can seed data sources that models rely on.
- Content strategists can write for recall, not clicks.
- Executives can measure influence inside the very systems their customers consult.
And for those who lead industries — GEO Forensics becomes the competitive edge that keeps them encoded in the model’s long-term memory.
From research to practice
When I released GEO Forensics™: A Framework for Measuring Brand Memory in Large Language Models in early 2025, the goal wasn’t to create another marketing gimmick.
It was to help brands reclaim visibility in a world no longer mediated by search engines.
Since then, hundreds of CMOs, founders, and agencies have begun running LLM visibility audits — discovering, often for the first time, whether their brand even exists in AI consciousness.
The results have been sobering… and empowering.
Because once you know how a model sees you,
you can teach it to see you better.
The future of brand strategy is neural
In the next five years, AI brand optimization will evolve from an experiment into a mainstream discipline.
GEO Forensics™ is the foundation — the diagnostic layer beneath that evolution.
Brands that master it will dominate LLM recall.
Those who ignore it will vanish from the world’s new source of truth: the model itself.
De Keyzer, T. (2025). GEO Forensics™: A Framework for Measuring Brand Memory in Large Language Models.
Customer Impact Research Publication, 2025.
If you’d like to test your brand’s memory inside ChatGPT,
download the GEO Forensics Toolkit and run your first audit.
