Why measurement is the first thing to do
SEO has rankings: there is a position on Google for every keyword, and that position is the starting point for any work. GEO has no rankings; it has prompts. When a customer types a question into ChatGPT or Gemini, they do not see ten ordered links; they receive a text answer where your brand name either appears or does not. Knowing how often it appears, in which questions and with what description is the starting point for any GEO consulting engagement.
The question "does my brand appear on ChatGPT?" has no binary answer. The same question asked ten times to the same engine can produce different results: the AI varies across sessions, updates the sources it uses, and responds differently in Portuguese and English. A single result is not a measurement; it is a sample of one. Those new to the term can read what is GEO before measuring; measurement is what makes the work concrete.
MessGEO is the GEO measurement and optimisation platform built by Messagency. It repeats the same prompts over a measurement cycle, calculates the percentage of times the brand appears on each engine, and shows where competitors stand in the same answers. The starting point is a GEO score that summarises the site's current readiness for AI search.
What a prompt is and how to choose them in Portugal
A prompt is the question a potential customer would ask an AI tool before deciding. Prompts aimed at the Portuguese market have a few specific characteristics.
The first is language. Most Portuguese-language content on the internet comes from Brazil, and AI tools learn from that content. A European Portuguese prompt uses different words from a Brazilian one: "marcação" instead of "agendamento", "telemóvel" instead of "celular", "pequeno-almoço" instead of "café da manhã". A Portuguese customer writes with their own words, and measurement prompts should reflect that.
The second is local intent. Many searches include a place: "near me", the name of a city, neighbourhood or municipality. "Dentist in Coimbra" and "dentist near me in Porto" are different prompts with potentially different results. In cities with tourists and foreign residents, such as Lisbon, Porto or the Algarve, it is worth measuring in English too.
MessGEO suggests prompts grouped by topic when you set up a brand. You can remove irrelevant ones and add your own. The limit is 150 prompts in total; for most businesses, 20 to 50 well-chosen prompts cover the main angles.
How MessGEO measures visibility
The setup process has five steps. In the first, you enter the brand name, the website, competitors (up to 15, or auto-suggested by the platform from the site) and the monitoring country and language. In the second, MessGEO extracts the brand description, sector and products and services from the site; the user reviews and confirms. In the third, topics group the prompts by theme and you can remove those that do not apply. In the fourth, you define the prompt set; MessGEO suggests by topic and you can add your own. In the fifth, you select up to three AI surfaces from ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, and set the measurement frequency, for example daily.
The initial analysis of the site and the generation of the proposed prompt set take about half a minute. Once the prompts and AI engines are confirmed, measurement runs at the chosen frequency, for example daily, and the dashboard has data from the first day. Results show the brand's appearance percentage over the measurement cycle for each engine, because the AI varies and a percentage over several tests is far more stable than a single result.
The configured competitors are measured from the same answers, at no extra cost: MessGEO analyses the answer it already obtained and extracts competitor mentions from it.
What the GEO score and the reports show
The GEO score summarises the site's current state for AI search in a single number. It evaluates several factors: AI bot access to the site, structured data, brand clarity, content citability and other technical and content indicators. It is a reference point for comparing before and after an optimisation effort.
The premium GEO reports show more detail:
- The prompts where the brand appears and those where it does not.
- The competitors mentioned in the same answers, organised by prompt.
- The sources the AI uses to build its answers about the sector; that list is a starting point for digital PR work.
The most useful reading crosses both perspectives: the prompts where a competitor appears and the brand does not are the next place to work.
Reading the dashboard: strengths and blind spots
The MessGEO dashboard organises results by topic. For each topic you see the appearance rate, the number of prompts with a mention, and in the premium reports, the competitors appearing in the same space.
A topic where the appearance rate is high means the AI already associates your brand with that theme. A topic where the rate is low but a competitor appears frequently is a blind spot to address. The difference between the two is not random: the AI associates your brand with a topic based on what is written on your website, your Google Business Profile, your social media and the external sources that mention you.
The action plan comes directly from here: the topic with the lowest appearance rate and the highest competitor presence is the first where it is worth investing in content, structured data or presence in external sources.
The connection to Search Console and GA4
GEO analysis and Search Console measure complementary things. Search Console measures what happens on Google after the site is indexed: impressions, clicks and positions for every keyword. GEO analysis measures what happens before the click: whether the brand appears in AI answers when the customer is still deciding.
The two sources together show the full journey. GEO analysis tells you whether the brand is present in the discovery phase, when the customer asks the AI what to choose. Search Console tells you whether the site receives clicks after that. Google Analytics 4 shows what the visitor does on the site after arriving.
In Portugal, as across the European Union, Analytics only counts visitors who accepted cookies; the numbers are a sample. What matters is the month-on-month trend, not the absolute number. MessGEO and Search Console do not have this limitation: they measure directly, without depending on cookie consent.
For what kind of business
GEO analysis makes sense for any business whose customers research before deciding. In Portugal, the cases where the difference is most visible:
- Clinics and healthcare services: the decision always starts with a search; trust is built before contact.
- Restaurants, accommodation and tourism: two audiences with different languages, Portuguese and English, asking the same questions to AI tools.
- Beauty and wellness services: the customer sees reviews and images before booking; the AI uses those same reviews.
- Professional services: law, accountancy, consulting, real estate; the decision is careful and the research is long.
- Local businesses in cities with an international presence: Lisbon, Porto, the Algarve, where part of the clientele searches in English.
Why Messagency
- We are in Portugal. Our headquarters is in Porto. Our team is made up of digital nomads and meetings are held in English; content for your customers is written in European Portuguese.
- We built MessGEO. We do not use a third-party tool: we built our own GEO measurement platform to measure exactly what we sell.
- GEO Advertisement starts here. Our GEO Advertisement service uses MessGEO to measure the starting point and progress every month.
- A conversation first. In the free 30-minute call we work through which prompts to measure and what kind of tracking makes sense for your brand.