PeakMetrics Inc. introduced a service that monitors how brands are depicted by five major generative artificial intelligence platforms and traces the online material driving those depictions. The narrative intelligence company said the offering, called AI Perceptions, is aimed at corporate communications teams that want to know how news coverage, social media chatter and other online narratives shape what AI services say about their organizations. The launch reflects the rising practice of generative engine optimization, or GEO, as consumers increasingly turn to AI assistants for product recommendations and company information. Unlike conventional search engine optimization, which centers on rankings and website traffic, GEO centers on whether and how a brand appears in AI-generated answers.
The service covers answers produced by OpenAI Group PBC's ChatGPT, Google LLC's Gemini, Anthropic PBC's Claude, xAI Corp.'s Grok and Perplexity AI Inc.'s namesake generative engine. Customers select questions for PeakMetrics to monitor, usually covering their brands, products, competitors and industry issues. The service sends those prompts to the five platforms on a regular basis, records the responses and analyzes how they change over time. Steven Childress, PeakMetrics' director of product, said customers typically monitor hundreds of prompts, spanning broad industry topics as well as questions about specific products or services.
PeakMetrics scores responses against criteria set by the customer, including favorability, trust, competitive positioning, message adoption and purchase intent. A company could use the system to learn whether an AI service recommends its product over a competitor's, or whether responses repeatedly tie the brand to a message it wants associated with it, such as sustainability. The platform also tracks the citations a large language model finds when it searches the web before answering, which can help communications teams identify the sites and pages influencing a response. Citation analysis is available only when the AI system invokes web search; Childress said the different models are given the ability to search and the system then determines whether each one chooses to do so.
PeakMetrics said it recently helped a customer trace inaccurate information about a movie theater chain to an outdated page on the customer's own website, and correcting that page let the organization address the misinformation at its source. AI Perceptions is integrated with the company's existing narrative intelligence platform, which analyzes news, social media, podcasts and other online sources. That combination is meant to show how a narrative begins, moves across channels and eventually surfaces in AI responses. The system also tries to separate genuine online discussion from automated or manipulated content, assigning bot-detection scores to social media accounts based on factors such as posting frequency, account age and follower patterns, while a partnership with Reality Defender Inc. adds analysis of potentially synthetic text, images and video.
Jessica Pratt, vice president of marketing and communications, said bot activity generally makes up 20% to 30% of the social media content in a customer workspace and can increase during a crisis. Such activity may not represent real public opinion, she said, but it can still influence people and potentially shape the sources AI systems rely on. Pratt said actors can use agentic workflows to reword messages while pushing the same underlying narrative, making campaigns harder to detect through basic copy-and-paste methods. She said that capability makes tracking narratives themselves more important, and that identifying who shares the same ideas even when the wording changes helps show how a narrative spreads and where it may have started.
The company describes AI Perceptions as a reputation management tool rather than simply an AI visibility monitor. Communications teams can compare perception before and after a campaign, find unfavorable answers and determine whether their own websites or third-party coverage are contributing to the results. Childress said the focus is less on a brand's visibility and more on its reputation. AI Perceptions is available immediately as part of the PeakMetrics platform, and the service is priced based on volume.
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