Pulp Strategy has introduced ‘The GEO Benchmark Index 2025,’ powered by Neurorank, a first-of-its-kind study that explores how AI assistants are now shaping brand discovery, trust, and competitive strength. The research evaluates 70 full-spectrum LLM visibility audits, covering 350+ cross-industry brands, through 408,000 real prompt simulations and insights from 60+ CMOs, revealing why 68 percent of brands remain invisible in AI-generated search results—and how this absence affects market relevance, demand, and credibility.
As one of India’s leading full-stack digital agencies, Pulp Strategy highlights that AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity are increasingly becoming the primary layer through which consumers and businesses learn about brands. The GEO Benchmark Index 2025 identifies a growing mismatch between what brands publish and what AI systems actually retain or interpret.
Key Findings
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68% of brands fail to show up in AI-generated category lists
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52% experience factual inaccuracies
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90% of consumer brands face disproportionate negative sentiment
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88% have naming inconsistencies or recognition issues across models
“AI assistants via Ai search are now the gatekeepers of demand,” said Ambika Sharma, Founder and Chief Strategist, Pulp Strategy. “If a brand is missing from AI-generated answers, it is missing from the customer’s world entirely. Its taken us 4+ months and over a 100 conversations with CMO’s leaders across industries to capture nuances and insights coded here. Our biggest learning was that Neurorank is a powerful system which is built for impact in a Ai search world with foggy visibility”
The report cautions business leaders that AI search is no longer a supplementary channel—it actively shapes procurement decisions, investor viewpoints, and high-intent consumer exploration. The GEO Benchmark Index 2025, backed by Pulp Strategy’s proprietary NeuroRank™ engine, also includes a 30–90 day improvement roadmap for boosting brand visibility in AI ecosystems. The complete report is available on the Pulp Strategy website and Neurorank.ai.
Generative AI has rapidly become the primary gateway for discovery among both consumers and enterprise decision-makers. Instead of navigating multiple websites, people now rely on AI assistants to shortlist brands, compare offerings, and assess trust signals.
Supporting this shift, external benchmarks indicate a 4,700% year-over-year surge in traffic sent by generative platforms to retail sites—traffic that carries substantially higher purchase intent.
What the GEO Benchmark Index 2025 Examines
The study evaluates how four major AI assistants—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity—recall, prioritise, and portray brands across categories such as BFSI, retail, technology, energy, and media. It is built on:
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70 comprehensive AI visibility audits
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350+ enterprise and consumer brands
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408,000+ real-world prompt simulations
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60+ interviews with CMOs, CEOs, and digital leaders
Core Findings
The report uncovers systemic issues affecting brand performance in AI responses:
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Severe invisibility: 68% do not appear in critical category searches
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Factual distortion: 52% experience hallucinated or incorrect details
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Sentiment bias: 90% of consumer brands face overly negative summaries
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Identity drift: 88% show inconsistent naming or brand recall
These gaps arise largely from non–machine-readable content formats—like PDFs, outdated structures, and unstructured pages—leading to weak AI trust signals and incomplete brand representation in knowledge graphs.
Business Impact
Insights from interviews and audits highlight that:
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AI assistants may exclude brands entirely from comparison queries
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Capabilities may be misrepresented due to outdated data
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ESG claims may be incorrectly interpreted
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Competitors may appear ahead of actual category leaders
For highly regulated sectors, the implications also include compliance concerns, procurement blind spots, and potential misalignment in investor narratives.
“AI assistants are rewriting how markets understand brands, This research shows the reality inside the models — and most brands will not like what they find,” said Ambika.
Using NeuroRank™, Pulp Strategy’s GEO intelligence engine, the GEO Benchmark Index 2025 integrates four major data tracks:
- Brand Audits: A structured assessment of 70 anonymised audits covering 350+ brands across sectors and markets. Each audit included content inventories, hallucination checks, top prompts, competitor analysis, and visibility recommendations.
- Prompt Simulations: Over 408,000 prompt interactions run on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, analysed for sentiment, accuracy, brand presence, and hallucination events.
- C-Suite Interviews: 60+ anonymised conversations with CMOs and business leaders, analysing themes related to GEO preparedness, content governance, and organisational risk.
- External Validation: Selected insights were cross-verified with independent datasets and mapped through a quantitative codebook that enabled large-scale pattern detection.
What Brands Can Do Next:
The report outlines a 30–60–90 day action blueprint to help brands:
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Improve factual accuracy
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Reduce hallucinations
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Strengthen AI-trusted content surfaces
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Enhance cross-model brand consistency
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Build machine-readable authority signals
