Frequently asked questions.

The index is a set of free public leaderboards showing which brands AI assistants recommend in a given category. Each board is produced by a documented, reproducible scoring method rather than a proprietary black box, and the full method is published at /methodology.

Yes. The public leaderboards are free to read, with no account and no sales call. indexwire charges for the work of improving a brand's position, not for showing where it stands.

Three, through adapters for ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Each run records the set it asked, and in the current methodology version every assistant counts equally. Adding an assistant later changes the answers, not the arithmetic.

A run puts a fixed set of prompts to the assistants for one category over one ISO week. Each answer contributes a brand's single best recommendation mention, weighted by how it was named, where it appeared, and whether it was cited, and the total is divided by every answer requested. The result is a share between 0 and 1. The full method is at /methodology.

Yes. indexwire competes in two of the launch categories and appears on those boards under the same method as every other brand, including in the weeks its own position goes backwards.

Eight: screenshot and scraping APIs, social scheduling, AI transcription, product analytics, transactional email APIs, help desk software, applied AI consulting, and AEO/SEO SaaS. Six are categories indexwire sells nothing in; two are ones it competes in.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the umbrella term for making content visible across AI-powered platforms. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the narrower slice focused on the answer-retrieval layer: getting a page selected and cited when an assistant needs a source for a specific fact, definition, or recommendation.

No. AEO builds on SEO. A page generally needs to be findable and credible to enter an assistant's retrieval set at all, and it needs clear, extractable structure to get cited from that set. The structural work is additional, not a replacement.

Most cite via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): the assistant interprets the question, retrieves candidate documents, ranks them, synthesizes an answer, and attributes specific claims to sources. Content that states clear, self-contained facts is easier to extract and attribute than content that buries them in dense prose.

The one large controlled study on this, the 2023 GEO benchmark paper from researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, IIT Delhi and the Allen Institute for AI, found that adding citations to sources, including relevant statistics, and quoting authorities lifted visibility in AI answers by up to 40 percent across a 10,000-query benchmark. Much of the other advice in circulation has no comparable study behind it.

Citation rate: how often your content is selected and attributed as a source in AI-generated answers. It is a leading indicator, harder to measure than clicks, which is the problem indexwire's open methodology exists to solve.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of structuring your content so AI assistants cite it when they answer a question. Where SEO helps you rank in a list of links, GEO helps you get mentioned inside the AI-generated answer itself.

SEO optimizes for position in a ranked list and drives clicks. GEO optimizes for citation inside a synthesized answer, which often means zero-click visibility: your content informs the answer without the user visiting your site. A page can rank well and still never be cited.

The 2023 GEO benchmark study from researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, IIT Delhi and the Allen Institute for AI tested nine content strategies across 10,000 queries. Adding citations to sources, including relevant statistics, and quoting authorities improved visibility by up to 40 percent. Several other commonly recommended tactics showed little reliable effect.

Broadly, yes. GEO, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization), GSO (Generative Search Optimization) and AIO all describe versions of the same practice. GEO has the most traction in published research, which is why it is the term used most often.

The assistants that cite sources today include ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, alongside AI answer features in traditional search. Their citation habits differ, and many of the specific claims about those habits come from vendor analyses rather than controlled studies, so treat platform-by-platform advice as directional rather than settled.

indexwire runs a fixed set of prompts against a set of AI assistants for one category over one ISO week. In each answer it records how a brand was named, where it appeared, and whether the mention was backed by a citation. Each answer contributes the brand's single best recommendation mention, and the total is divided by every answer requested. The result is a share between 0 and 1.

Yes. The full method is published at /methodology, and the scoring code reads no clock and uses no randomness. The same recorded answers, scored under the same version, produce a byte-identical result. A methodology change recomputes from the answers already on record rather than probing the assistants again.

Three, through adapters for ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. In v1 every prompt and every assistant counts equally; there is no weighting that favors one over another. Which assistants a run covers is configuration, recorded per run, not part of the arithmetic.

No. A score is a share between 0 and 1 of one category's prompt set in one ISO week. It is only comparable against the other brands in that same run, not across categories or across weeks with different prompts.

No. Only recommendation-style mentions carry weight: a primary recommendation, an alternative, or an honorable mention. Being named as a comparison target, as passing context, or as a cautionary example scores nothing. Being mentioned unfavorably is neutral, not a penalty.

Every run is stamped with the version it was scored under, so a score always carries the method that produced it. Because the score is a pure function of the recorded answers, a new method re-folds the existing answers into new numbers, and the re-folded scores carry the new version. Silent changes would be fraud; a dated version is the alternative.