Your Brand Scores 12/100 on AI. Here's Why That's a Crisis.

There is a new scoreboard for your brand. It runs 24 hours a day, handles millions of prompts, and every score is given as a direct recommendation to a potential customer. Most brands don't know their score. Most marketers haven't even heard the name of the game yet.

The game is Generative Engine Optimisation . The scoreboard is every AI engine your customers use — ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude, Perplexity, and four Asian engines your competitors have never thought about. And in early 2026, the average brand in Hong Kong scores 12 out of 100.

What We Actually Measured

Geoneo scans brands across 10 AI engines simultaneously, asking each engine a category-defining question like "best [brand's category] company in Hong Kong" or "top [industry] brand in Asia." A citation — where the AI engine mentions or recommends your brand — scores positively. Silence or competitor mentions score zero for you.

What we found when we ran 50 Hong Kong brands through this process:

The pattern is clear and consistent: most brands are effectively invisible to AI engines, regardless of how well they perform on Google . Their SEO investment has not translated to GEO presence because the two systems work differently.

Why Google Rankings Don't Transfer to AI Citations

Google ranks pages. AI engines cite entities. That difference — seemingly small — has enormous implications for brand strategy.

When Google crawls the web, it ranks documents by relevance, authority, and keyword match. When ChatGPT or Gemini answers a prompt, it is synthesising patterns from its training data to identify which entity best answers the question. The entity — your brand — needs to have a clear, consistent, authoritative identity across the web for AI engines to confidently cite it.

Most brand websites were built for keyword ranking. They have pages optimised for "best accounting firm Hong Kong" but those pages are written for human readers on Google, not for AI engines building a model of what your firm actually is .