Frequently Asked Questions

Talebeacon gives you an intervention plan: what to change, most useful first, rebuilt after every scan. A step might be a page on your site to rewrite, or a review site where you're missing. The plan rests on evidence you can open: how often AI answers name you on each question your buyers ask, next to your competitors, whether they recommend you or mention you with caution, and which sources they drew on. You also get a before-and-after on the same questions, and direct access to our team.

Talebeacon measures AI visibility as how often AI answers name your brand, a figure the field calls the share of answers. Each scan puts 162 questions your buyers would ask to each engine, with web search on. Each answer is also sorted by how it treats you: it recommends you, mentions you, mentions you with caution, warns against you, or leaves you out. We count a share, not a rank, because single answers change from run to run, while a brand's share across many answers holds steady (SparkToro, January 2026).

Talebeacon covers three AI engines on the Launch Plan: ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, each answering all 162 questions with web search on. We think these three cover most of where buyers ask today. New engines join the plan as we measure them, starting November 2026; an engine that costs much more to read may come as an add-on. If your buyers rely on one we don't list, talk to us. Search matters: when ChatGPT searched the web, about 80% of the products it recommended were different from its picks without search (Visibility Labs, June 2026).

Talebeacon writes the questions from six buyer types in your market, 27 questions each, and you approve the buyer types before anything runs. We draft them from your website and the market you choose; one might be an agency owner comparing cheaper tools. You can swap any one, or redraw all six up to three times. That gives 162 different questions per engine, each asked once. The next scan asks the same ones, so you compare like with like.

Talebeacon covers the market you choose and asks in your site's language. A market can be one country, a region such as German-speaking Europe, or the whole world. We detect the language from your website, and you can change it when you set up. The market shapes the six buyer types we draft, so the questions sound like your buyers where they are.

Talebeacon needs only one web address to start: your website, or the page of the product line or product you want us to look at. We read it and fill in a first draft of the profile. You confirm the name and where your buyers are: a country, a region or worldwide. Adding competitors is optional. Then you approve the six buyer types we propose, and the scan starts.

Yes: Talebeacon can look at a whole brand, one product line or a single product, depending on the page you give us. Paste the URL of that page, and we build the profile around it: what it is, who buys it and who it competes with. You confirm the scope before anything runs. The buyer types and questions are then drawn from that profile, so a line of running shoes is read as a line of running shoes, not as the whole brand.

A scan takes about an hour after you approve the buyer types we propose, and we email you when it's done. Drafting the buyer types takes about five minutes from the moment you start. In that hour, each engine answers 162 questions, and we check which sources each answer drew on.

Talebeacon runs a full scan as often as every three days: up to ten a month, whenever you choose. Each one puts 162 questions to each of three engines, reads all 486 answers and rebuilds your plan. We built it this way on purpose. It is the best balance we have found between monitoring you often enough and giving you the full value of every feature. AI answers shift from one day to the next with no cause, so real change shows over days and weeks. Every scan shows you that change, and the next thing to do about it.

Yes, you can ask ChatGPT yourself, and you should: a handful of your buyers' questions gives a useful first map. One check can't show how often you're named across many questions and engines, why, or what to fix first. Your own chat may also lean on your history and location, which your buyers' chats don't share. Doing it properly means writing hundreds of questions, reading every answer and turning them into steps. That's a build-or-buy choice: your team's time, or a service that already does it.

Talebeacon is built for what comes after the numbers: an intervention plan, each change ready to do, rebuilt after every scan. A tracker shows how often engines name you and, in many tools, which sources they cite. That's worth having, and Talebeacon shows it too. We then work out why each answer said what it said: what the engine read, and what it weighed, such as price or fit. The plan turns that into changes, most useful first.

Talebeacon is for any company whose buyers ask AI engines what to buy, in any category. It's built for the people who manage how a brand, product line or product shows up online: marketing leads, founders, growth teams, or anyone else with that job. The engines are now a front door for many buyers: ChatGPT alone has about 900 million weekly users (OpenAI, February 2026).

Talebeacon costs $299 a month on the Launch Plan, for one brand, product line or product. That's a launch price, offered for a limited time. Prices will change later; if you join now, yours stays locked for your first 12 months. It's billed monthly with no 12-month commitment, and you can cancel any time. Each month covers ten full scans on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and a plan of what to change after every scan. For more than one, talk to us.

Talebeacon has no free trial; instead, the Founding Program gives 12 brands the Launch Plan free for three months, by application. Applications close on 31 October 2026. In return we ask for candid feedback, and for your team to put the plan's top actions in place. We ask for a testimonial only if your results improve.

Your team or your agency makes the changes; Talebeacon's plan says what to change, where, and in what order. Who can do what is being rewritten fast. With AI tools, many changes that once needed a developer or an agency can now be made in-house, though every company is at a different point. The plan starts with your own site, because it is what an engine reads when it searches and the fastest thing a team can change. Our team is on hand while you work through it.

Talebeacon can't promise that anything changes, because only the companies that run the AI engines control what they say. We don't own the machine. What the next scan gives you is an honest record: it asks the same questions and shows what moved and what didn't. The plan is rebuilt from that result, the Launch Plan is billed monthly, and you can cancel any time.

Talebeacon is run by Talebeacon Ltd., a company we founded in 2026 after years inside software companies. Our job there was finding the shift in how people decide, and building for it before it was obvious. We like marketing, and we like knowing how things work under the hood. We measure before we advise: every finding we show you comes from a scan you can open. You can reach us at hello@talebeacon.com, or read more about us.

Your results are yours. We don't sell them, don't show them to other customers, and don't train AI models on them. Brands you add can also count, anonymously, toward our planned category benchmarks — never shown on their own, and you can exclude any brand in the product's settings. To run a scan, we send the AI engines buyer questions we write, and nothing that identifies your account. Ask us to delete your data and it's gone within 45 days. Every service involved is described in our privacy notice.

GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of getting AI engines to mention a brand and describe it accurately. It covers engines like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, and the same field is also called AEO (answer engine optimization), AI search optimization or LLMO (large language model optimization); we write GEO for convenience. The aim is not to trick a model. It is to give the engine a brand's true story, in the terms it weighs, such as price or fit, on the pages it reads.

GEO, AEO and AI visibility are one field under different names: GEO and AEO name the work, and AI visibility names what gets measured. GEO stands for generative engine optimization, AEO for answer engine optimization; AI search optimization and LLMO (large language model optimization) are also in use. The analysts haven't settled on one. Gartner titled a March 2026 report "Market Guide for Answer Engine Visibility Tools", while G2 files the category as "Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)". We write GEO for convenience.

Two things decide whether an AI engine mentions a brand: what the model remembers from the text it was trained on, and what it reads when it searches today. When ChatGPT searched the web, about 80% of the products it recommended were different from its picks without search (Visibility Labs via Search Engine Land, June 2026). Across 75,000 brands, mentions on YouTube and elsewhere online tracked how often engines named a brand far more closely than links did (Ahrefs, December 2025). That is a correlation, not proof of cause.

GEO differs from SEO in its target: SEO competes for a place in a list of links, GEO for a place inside the answer. Inside the answer, the engine picks what to weigh, writes the comparison and describes each brand in its own words. The pages it cites are often not the top search results: only 12% of pages cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity rank in Google's top 10 for the same search (Ahrefs, updated May 2026).

GEO is unlikely to hurt your SEO; as far as we can tell, most of the work helps both. Clear answers under headings that match the question, pages kept current, and a brand that other sites talk about are long-standing search advice too. We know of no study that measures a trade-off between the two. The risk, we think, sits in shortcuts, such as pages written for machines instead of readers.

GEO is ethical when it gives AI engines a brand's true story, and unethical when it fakes one. The honest version states a brand's real claims on the pages engines read, in the terms they weigh, with proof they can cite. The dishonest version runs on fake reviews and invented credentials. Those mislead the buyers who read the answer, not only the engine that writes it.

If an AI engine gets facts about your brand wrong, correct them where the engine reads: your own site first, then what others write about you. About 1 in 10 brand facts in AI answers were graded wrong, pricing most often, in a July 2026 study by Searchable, which sells into this market. Your site comes first because it is what the engine reads when it searches, and the fastest thing a team can change. Then ask again, more than once, to see if the answer moved.