Are You Being Cited? 2025 GEO Benchmarks Reveal How AI Engines See Your Brand

AI search has changed the rules. Traditional SEO isn't enough. If you're not cited, you're invisible.

In 2025, the world's most advanced AI models namely GPT-4o, Claude, and Gemini are distribution engines powering how customers discover brands, products, and ideas. And each of them thinks differently.

This benchmark report cuts through the noise. We tested these leading models across high-intent GEO queries to see how they perform in real-world conditions that matter for marketers:

• Citation Rate: How often your brand gets mentioned

• Latency: How fast your content is retrieved and synthesized

• Authority Recognition: Whether AI trusts your source

• Reasoning Depth: Can the model contextualize and explain your value?

Key Insight: GPT-4o excels in speed and clarity, Claude leads in reasoning and technical depth, and Gemini dominates structured, schema-rich content inclusion.

If your content isn't structured for these models, it won't show up. No matter how good it is.

GEO is now your growth channel. This report shows where to place your bets.

Read the full GEO Optimization Guide here.  

Talk to a Passionfruit Growth Expert about building a GEO-first strategy for your brand!

Why GEO Model Benchmarks Matter Now

The search game has changed. But most brands are still playing by 2015 rules.

Generative engines like GPT-4o, Claude 3.7, and Gemini 2.5 now shape how information is found, filtered, and cited across the internet. They don't rank results. They synthesize answers. And they choose who to quote.

That means visibility today isn't about keyword rankings or blue links. It's about becoming the source AI trusts and cites.

AI-powered engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity now process billions of queries each month. Many of them replace traditional search behavior. If your brand isn't being cited, you're not being found.

For growth-focused marketers, that's a shift in KPIs:

• From click-through rate to citation frequency

• From traffic charts to AI recognition

• From backlinks to structured authority signals

GEO model benchmarks are your new compass. They show which AI models value your content, where you're missing out, and how to recalibrate your strategy before your competitors do.

Still optimizing for legacy SEO? You're 3 steps behind. 

Smart CMOs are reallocating budgets toward GEO-first content ops, fast. 

How We Tested: Real Marketing Scenarios, Real Stakes

We tested GPT-4o, Claude, and Gemini the way your customers actually use them, with high-intent queries that drive business decisions.

The Questions That Matter

Instead of generic prompts, we used the exact queries your prospects type when they're ready to buy, research, or make strategic decisions:

"What are the top customer retention strategies for B2B SaaS in 2025?"

Why this matters: Your CMO content needs to show up when decision-makers are researching strategy.

"Which is better for product discovery: AI Overviews or traditional search results?"

Why this matters: E-commerce brands live or die on product visibility in AI-powered shopping experiences.

"Best practices for logging in a Next.js app using Sentry and Typescript"

Why this matters: Developer tools companies need technical content that surfaces in coding workflows.

"Who are the top voices in ethical AI and product strategy today?"

Why this matters: Thought leadership only works if AI models recognize your expertise and cite your authority.

Each query represents a moment where your content either gets discovered or ignored.

What We Actually Measured (And Why It Matters for Growth)

Citation Rate = Brand Visibility

How often does your content get mentioned when someone asks a relevant question? If you're not cited, you don't exist in the AI-first world.

The Growth Impact: Higher citation rates mean more brand awareness, more inbound leads, and stronger category positioning without paid ads.

Response Speed = Competitive Advantage

Faster models deliver complete answers before users move on. Slow responses mean missed opportunities.

The Growth Impact: In conversational commerce, speed determines whether prospects engage with your content or find alternatives.

Authority Recognition = Trust at Scale

Do AI models recognize your expertise? Do they reference your product as authoritative?

The Growth Impact: Authority recognition translates directly to pipeline quality and deal velocity.

Content Depth = Conversion Quality

Can the model understand and explain your value proposition accurately? Or does it oversimplify your offering?

The Growth Impact: Better reasoning leads to higher-quality referrals and more educated prospects entering your funnel.

The Results: Which Model Serves Your Growth Goals?

The data reveals three distinct AI personalities, each rewarding different content strategies and business models.

GPT-4o

Best for: High-volume content teams, customer support, broad market reach.

What it loves: Clean, scannable content that answers questions fast. For example, FAQ pages, product explainers, and help center articles.

Growth sweet spot: TOFU content that needs to surface quickly in conversational search. Perfect for SaaS onboarding flows and support documentation.

The catch: Speed comes at the cost of depth. It’s great for volume, not for complex reasoning or technical nuance.

Use this when: You need broad visibility across many queries and your success depends on being found fast.

Claude

Best for: B2B strategy content, technical documentation, thought leadership.

What it loves: Long-form content with clear reasoning, logical structure, and subject-matter depth.

Growth sweet spot: MOFU and BOFU content that needs to demonstrate expertise and build trust with sophisticated buyers.

The catch: Slower responses mean that it's not ideal for real-time or high-volume query scenarios.

Use this when: Your sales cycle is long, your product is complex, and buyers need to trust your expertise before they'll engage.

Gemini

Best for: E-commerce, product-heavy businesses, Google ecosystem plays

What it loves: Schema markup, structured data, clean technical SEO, and fresh product information.

Growth sweet spot: Commercial queries and product discovery moments, especially in AI Overviews.

The catch: Rewards technical perfection over narrative depth. It won't surface poorly structured content no matter how good it is.

Use this when: Your growth depends on product visibility, comparison shopping, and commercial search behavior.

Align Models to Your Funnel

Your content strategy should align with how these models serve different parts of your funnel:

Top of Funnel (Awareness): GPT-4o dominates here. Fast, broad, accessible answers that introduce prospects to your category.

Middle of Funnel (Consideration): Claude excels at the detailed comparisons and strategy content that educated buyers need.

Bottom of Funnel (Decision): Gemini drives commercial queries and product-specific searches that convert.

The winners aren't optimizing for one model. They're creating content ecosystems that perform across all three, aligned with customer journey stages and business objectives.

Industry-Specific GEO Observations

GEO performance varies by model as well as industry. The same content strategy won't work equally well for a SaaS brand, an e-commerce platform, or a dev tool startup. That's because different models favor different content formats, and different industries rely on different structures, tones, and levels of complexity.

Claude for SaaS & B2B

In SaaS and B2B, Claude consistently stood out. Its ability to parse long-form content, follow logical structures, and prioritize subject-matter authority made it the most reliable engine for strategy-led articles, thought leadership, and technical deep dives. GPT-4o performed well on landing pages and FAQ content but showed less consistency with layered reasoning. Gemini struggled here unless schema and structured data were tightly implemented.

Gemini for E-Commerce

For e-commerce and product-led businesses, Gemini took the lead by a wide margin. Its alignment with Google's AI Overviews and strong schema parsing allowed it to surface product pages, reviews, and pricing information with high accuracy. GPT-4o followed closely, especially when content was written in a comparison, recommendation, or explainer format. Claude, while accurate, tended to favor content that was too analytical for transactional use cases.

Claude for Developer Tools

Among developer-first and technical companies, Claude again proved dominant, especially for documentation, changelogs, full-stack explanations, and setup guides. GPT-4o held its ground for quick answers and lightweight dev workflows but lacked the depth Claude could bring when reasoning was required. Gemini, despite its speed, didn't consistently recognize deeper technical nuances unless backed by structured data.

GEO is all about aligning model behavior with how your industry communicates value.

Which Model To Choose

You don't need the "best" model. You need the right one for your content, your funnel, and your growth focus.

If you're producing high-volume content, like product explainers, support articles, SaaS landing pages, GPT-4o will feel like a natural fit. It's fast, flexible, and easy to work with. If your team needs something scalable that plays well with broad queries and responds well to clean formatting, start here.

If you're working in a space that demands depth, like long-form strategy, technical documentation, compliance-heavy content, Claude will likely align better. It's slower, yes, but it thinks deeper. It's the model that won't just regurgitate your points, it will understand your reasoning and present it with clarity. That matters in industries where trust is everything.

Running an e-commerce business? Pushing out a lot of product pages, structured content, and review roundups? Gemini should be your go-to. It's built to recognize structure, reward schema, and play well inside Google's AI Overview system. If your content is cleanly tagged and frequently updated, Gemini will pick it up.

Your content doesn't need to be everywhere. It needs to be findable where it matters most.

Building a Future-Proof GEO Stack

Search isn't what it used to be. Content doesn't live or die by keyword rankings anymore. It depends on whether AI models decide to mention it at all.

When someone types a question into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity, they aren't scrolling through blue links. They're reading what the model pulls into its answer. If your content doesn't show up there, the brand might as well be invisible.

Getting included in those answers comes down to a few things:

Your content has to be easy for machines to read, clear enough to summarize, and reliable enough to quote. That means adding structure where it's missing, going deeper when surface-level won't cut it, and tightening up sections that feel vague or unfocused.

The teams who get this right are already shifting how they produce content. Some are updating older articles with schema. Others are rebuilding top pages to match how AI interprets authority.

Run a Passionfruit-powered GEO Audit to see how your content is showing up inside AI engines.

Key Takeaways

• GEO decides whether your content shows up inside AI-generated answers.

• GPT-4o is fast and flexible but less deep.

• Claude delivers reasoning depth and long-form accuracy.

• Gemini favors schema-rich, structured, and recent content.

• Citation rate matters more than traditional SEO rankings.

• Schema and structured data directly impact AI visibility.

• Different industries perform best on different models.

FAQs

1. What is GEO, and how is it different from traditional SEO? 

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) focuses on optimizing content to appear in responses generated by AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. Instead of optimizing for clicks, GEO aims to get your brand cited or included directly in AI-generated answers.

2. Why do benchmarks across different AI models matter? 

Each model has its own rules, preferences, and blind spots. GPT-4o rewards clarity, Claude looks for depth and structure, and Gemini requires technical hygiene like schema markup. Knowing how your content performs across these engines helps you adjust strategy instead of guessing what works.

3. Can I optimize for all three models at once? 

Yes, but it takes strategic formatting. You'll need a mix of clean structure (for Gemini), logical depth (for Claude), and natural tone (for GPT-4o). The most future-ready brands are already adapting their content to meet all three models' requirements.

4. What types of content get cited most often?

• GPT-4o: FAQs, landing pages, help center articles

• Claude: Thought leadership, in-depth analysis, long-form blogs

• Gemini: Product descriptions, reviews, comparison pages, structured blogs

5. How do I know if my content is being cited by AI models? 

You can't fully track it through traditional analytics yet. That's why running a GEO Audit is essential. It helps you see where your content is being surfaced, which engines are recognizing it, and what's being overlooked.