The news: OpenAI is developing a visibility tool that could have far-reaching implications for brands’ generative engine optimization (GEO) strategies, per Digiday.

The AI company is building a dashboard that lets businesses track their number of mentions in ChatGPT responses and clicks to their websites. The dashboard is part of a larger Business Hub feature, which has yet to be released. Ecommerce ads advisor Juozas Kaziukėnas was the first to report on the dashboard, via LinkedIn.

Why it matters: Tracking ChatGPT mentions in the form of impressions and clicks isn’t a novel development—EMARKETER offers this information through our AI Visibility Index—but an OpenAI dashboard is notable for two reasons.

• The tracking data would be more comprehensive because it’s coming straight from the source—OpenAI—compared with third-parties that can only catch a partial view of mentions.
• The dashboard indicates that OpenAI is exploring GEO as a new area to support brands in ChatGPT.

Visibility in AI search is a top concern for US marketers—in January, 94% planned to increase their GEO investments this year, per Conductor—and OpenAI is in a unique position to actually do something about this. Opening up its black box would be highly consequential to brands’ GEO efforts because it could illuminate causal relationships between content strategies and visibility that have otherwise remained out of reach.

However, this would require OpenAI to divulge information at the prompt level, which it has yet to do for even ads measurement—to the frustration of advertisers. Plus, OpenAI would need to navigate how to help brands without giving them a way to game ChatGPT responses and therefore compromise the platform.

Implications for marketers: It could soon become necessary to reevaluate GEO strategies in light of new data coming from OpenAI. This doesn’t mean immediately canceling contracts or subscriptions with external partners providing GEO services, nor ending analysis in-house, but it will be essential to establish more clarity on the value these efforts are providing.

For instance, GEO partners can track AI visibility with respect to competitors, giving brands a benchmark for contextualizing their presence. In-house analysis can also do this if data science capabilities are strong enough. OpenAI’s data on brand mentions can be used to corroborate these numbers and expose methodologies that are unsound. But if OpenAI deepens its GEO offerings, external partners may find it more difficult to prove that their services are necessary, and in-house efforts may become redundant.

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