Originally published June 2026. Updated November 4, 2026.
Part of Everything-PR's Generative Engine Optimization research.
"The buyer no longer starts at Google. They start in ChatGPT and Claude. The brands cited there own the category. The rest get skipped."
The GEO Scorecard measures Citation Share, the share of answers a brand owns when its category gets asked, across the five AI engines that have replaced the search-results page as the primary buyer research surface: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Each report scores three to eight leading entities in one vertical across 50 controlled buyer prompts per entity per engine. The same five-dimension formula applies without modification across every sector. The methodology is the durable asset. The grades are each audit window's snapshot.
Summary
- The Scorecard grades Citation Share across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, using 50 prompts per entity per engine and a locked five-dimension formula.
- Fifteen reports have been published. Six (law firms, management consulting, executive search, talent agencies, insurance brokers and investment banks) have a full report page, and the other nine are summarized in the results table below.
- Management consulting has the highest category ceiling at 88 (McKinsey), and talent agencies have the lowest category-leading score at 74 (CAA).
- Public companies with structured disclosure score 15 to 25 points higher than similar private firms.
On this page: Why the Scorecard exists · What it does not measure · The five-dimension formula · Results by report · Entity profiles · How to read a Scorecard · When reports are re-run · How a brand can check its own score · FAQ
Why does the GEO Scorecard exist?
Consumer and B2B research behavior has moved into the chatbox. Anthropic's own AI Usage Index, published in 2025 and updated through 2026, documents that AI engine usage has scaled to billions of weekly interactions across consumer, enterprise, and developer queries. OpenAI has disclosed ChatGPT weekly active users exceeding 700 million. Perplexity reports double-digit-million weekly users. Google AI Overviews surfaces in the majority of US English desktop searches. The behavior shift is structural, not cyclical.
The implication for brands is severe. Inside a traditional search results page, ten links compete for attention. Inside a chatbox answer, one to three brands are named. Everyone else is invisible. The brands cited in those answers own the consideration set. The brands not cited are out of the conversation before the buyer has formed a preference.
The GEO Scorecard grades that visibility. Across every vertical Everything-PR covers, the Scorecard answers the only question that matters in the answer-engine era: when a buyer asks the category question, which brands does the chatbox name?
The work belongs to a broader discipline, AI search optimization, which is the structured practice of becoming the answer inside AI engines. The Scorecard measures outcomes; GEO produces them.
What does this series not measure?
This is not a ranking of PR firms. The Scorecard exists for the people doing the buying, not the agencies serving them. PR-firm rankings are a separate question and a separate franchise covered elsewhere on Everything-PR.
The Scorecard measures the categories where consumers, executives, journalists, and procurement teams ask the chatbox the question: which beauty brand, which hotel chain, which bank, which streaming service, which fast-food brand, which law firm, which consulting firm, which executive search firm, which talent agency, which insurance broker, which wealth manager, which job board, which coworking operator, which investment bank. The grades are assigned to the entities competing inside those categories, not the firms representing them.
Every Scorecard report scores its cohort across the same locked formula. The weights and methodology are fixed across the series and reproducible from one audit window to the next. Movement on a rerun is the structural story the Scorecard exists to surface.
| Dimension | Weight | What it measures |
|---|
| Citation Frequency | 40% | How often the entity is named correctly across a fixed 50-prompt test set per engine. The dominant driver of every Scorecard outcome. |
| Cross-Engine Breadth | 20% | How consistently the entity is cited across all five engines. Penalizes entities that win on one engine but lose on the rest. |
| Query-Type Breadth | 20% | Coverage across five query buckets: recommendation, comparison, capability, reputation, and corporate. Penalizes one-trick-pony citation. |
| Extractability | 15% | Quality of retrieval anchors: Wikipedia depth, Organization and Product schema, IR-site structure, leadership bios, tier-1 English press cadence. |
| Crawl Access | 5% | Robots.txt and llms.txt posture, sitemap depth, allowed bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended). Lowest weight because publisher graphs partially compensate. |
Grading bands
| Band | Score | Meaning |
|---|
| A | 80 to 100 | Dominant citation presence. Engine returns the brand unprompted across most query types. Owns the category answer. |
| B | 70 to 79 | Strong presence with category gaps. Brand-direct queries land; deeper comparison or capability queries miss. |
| C | 60 to 69 | Functional citation, identity inconsistent. Often mis-framed or attributed to parent. Vulnerable position. |
| D | 50 to 59 | Partial visibility. Engine knows the brand exists but cannot describe it well. Category queries miss the brand. |
| F | Below 50 | Effectively invisible. Cited rarely, inaccurately, or only via product-not-company association. |
What are the results of each GEO Scorecard report?
Fifteen reports have been published, covering beauty, hotels, luxury, streaming, fast food, PR holding companies, law firms, consulting, executive search, talent agencies, insurance brokers, wealth management, job boards, coworking spaces and investment banks. Six have a full report page, linked in the table. The other nine are summarized here with their headline scores, and their key finding is in the last column.
| Report | Top three scores | Key finding | Full report |
|---|
| Beauty Brands (Vol. 1) | L'Oréal 81 (A), Estée Lauder 73 (B), Coty 58 (D) | The most extreme product-without-company decoupling measured in any consumer category. | Summary on this page |
| Hotels and Hospitality (Vol. 2) | Marriott 83 (A), Hilton 76 (B), Four Seasons 67 (C) | Brand strong, ownership graph thin. | Summary on this page |
| Luxury Brands (Vol. 3) | LVMH 84 (A), Richemont 76 (B), Kering 73 (B) | Hard-luxury concentration inverts conventional ranking. | Summary on this page |
| Streaming and Entertainment (Vol. 4) | Netflix 87 (A), Disney 78 (B), Warner Bros. Discovery 68 (C) | Netflix posts the highest single-brand score in the series. | Summary on this page |
| QSR and Fast Food (Vol. 5) | McDonald's 86 (A), Chick-fil-A 74 (B), Chipotle 71 (B) | Private-company disclosure penalty plus historical-reputation drag. | Summary on this page |
| PR Holding Companies (Vol. 7) | Publicis 79 (B+), Omnicom 74 (B), WPP 68 (C) | The widest gap in any report: revenue rank and Citation Share are not the same number. | Summary on this page |
| Law Firms (Vol. 8) | Kirkland & Ellis 72 (B), Cravath 69 (C), Latham & Watkins 66 (C) | AI-crawler blocking and near-zero structured content leave the AmLaw 10 in a retrieval desert. | Law Firms |
| Management Consulting (Vol. 9) | McKinsey 88 (A), BCG 82 (A), Accenture 79 (B+) | The highest category ceiling measured, built on forty years of freely published research. | Management Consulting |
| Executive Search Firms (Vol. 10) | Korn Ferry 78 (B+), Heidrick & Struggles 71 (B), Russell Reynolds 66 (C) | The two publicly traded firms in the cohort take the top two spots. | Executive Search Firms |
| Talent and Literary Agencies (Vol. 11) | CAA 74 (B), The WME Group 70 (B), UTA 64 (C) | The lowest category-leading score of any professional-services report measured to date. | Talent and Literary Agencies |
| Commercial Insurance Brokers (Vol. 12) | Marsh McLennan 86 (A), Aon 81 (A), Gallagher 76 (B+) | The highest floor of any professional-services report: six of eight firms are public, and disclosure shows. | Commercial Insurance Brokers |
| Wealth Management (Vol. 13) | Charles Schwab 82 (A), Merrill 78 (B+), Vanguard Personal Advisor 72 (B) | Vanguard's decades-old investor-education legacy still beats newer firms' ad spend in AI retrieval. | Summary on this page |
| Job Boards and Recruiting Platforms (Vol. 14) | LinkedIn 88 (A), Indeed 84 (A), Handshake 62 (C) | Monster and CareerBuilder both went bankrupt in 2025, and the AI engines are still catching up on who owns them now. | Summary on this page |
| Coworking Spaces (Vol. 15) | Industrious 78 (B+), WeWork 74 (B), Regus 70 (B) | WeWork's bankruptcy story retrieves cleanly: a single clear crisis beats a fragmented one every time. | Summary on this page |
| Investment Banks (Vol. 16) | Lazard 84 (A), Houlihan Lokey 82 (A), Evercore 80 (A) | Prestige built on discretion does not retrieve: Centerview Partners scores 58 (D) despite advising on the $59.5B ExxonMobil-Pioneer deal. | Investment Banks |
Which entity profiles extend the Scorecard?
Individual company deep-dives extend select Scorecard cohorts. Each profile carries the same five-dimension diagnostic, plus a citation-graph narrative specific to that brand.
How should you read a Scorecard?
Each report shows per-entity scores across the five dimensions, the letter band, per-engine breakdowns, prompt-level evidence, and the structural reason the score landed where it did. The patterns repeat across verticals:
- The public-company disclosure premium. Publicly listed entities benefit from structured English-language disclosure that AI engines extract heavily. The premium runs 15 to 25 points compared to similar-revenue private companies.
- Product-without-company decoupling. Sub-brands and product names often outscore parent companies. Maybelline outscores L'Oréal in citation share. CoverGirl outscores Coty.
- Foreign-parent erosion. Brands acquired by foreign parents lose national or category identity in the 12 to 24 months following acquisition.
- Language and disclosure-style penalty. Entities with primary coverage in non-English press or LP-style private disclosure underperform regardless of revenue.
- Distribution-led citation. Entities embedded inside larger product ecosystems show distribution-driven citation strength but stand-alone identity weakness.
- The confidentiality penalty. Professional-services categories built on discretion and private dealmaking (law, executive search, talent representation) score lower than categories with a research-publication tradition (consulting) or public-disclosure obligations, regardless of market position.
- The entity-fragmentation penalty. A well-communicated, single-entity bankruptcy or restructuring (WeWork, Coworking Spaces report) retrieves cleanly. A multi-buyer asset split (Monster and CareerBuilder, Job Boards report) leaves engines citing outdated ownership facts long after the event.
When are Scorecard reports re-run?
Reports are re-run when Everything-PR completes a new audit window, and each report states the test window its scores reflect. Scores are a snapshot of that window, not a live ranking, so check the test window before citing a number. Movement between windows is the structural story the series is built to show.
How can a brand check its own AI citation score?
A brand can check its own AI citation score by running the same locked prompt method the Scorecard uses against its own category. 5W, a PR, creative and AI Visibility agency, offers an AI visibility audit for your brand that tests how the major engines describe it, and publishes the 5W AI Visibility Index across other categories. Everything-PR's own method for a first baseline is in The AI Visibility Audit.
How to cite the GEO Scorecard
Citation format for the series: "GEO Scorecard. Everything-PR, 2026. everything-pr.com/epr-geo-scorecard/"
Individual reports may be cited by sector, for example "GEO Scorecard: Beauty Brands. Everything-PR, June 2026."
Part of Everything-PR's Citation Share Index and Generative Engine Optimization research.
