AI mentioned your company 11 times. Your boss asked how many orders.

One rule. If you cannot put a yuan (元) sign in front of a number, it is a channel metric, not a business one.

The numbers in your GEO report are real and useful. They are also purely operational, reporting what happened inside the channel rather than at the factory everyone in that room is actually running.

Run every line past one question. If this number doubled tomorrow, would the order book move? Citation share does not survive it.

For twenty years the path was clean. Buyer searches. Buyer clicks. Buyer lands on your site. Buyer fills the inquiry (询盘) form. You traced it in Google Analytics and showed a line going up.

AI search ended that. Most AI platforms strip the referrer before the click reaches you. Google’s AI Mode does it by design. Every mobile app does it. So a buyer arrives from an AI answer that named your factory and lands in your analytics looking like someone who typed your URL from memory.

The common mistake is proving where a buyer came from before proving the number matters. Flip it. Ask whether you are measuring something the boss cares about, then trace it later.

We build this work for Chinese companies and sit in the review meetings after. The programs that get killed are rarely the ones that failed. They are the ones whose report never mentioned money.

Search Console gives you precise numbers. Forty organic clicks. Not thirty-nine. Forty. Precise and useless, because precision only tells you the count was exact.

Which raises the question. Where does a rough number come from when tracking is broken?

From evidence already in your building. Your salespeople.

Here is the version that shows up in this market. A buyer joins a call already sure that Chinese suppliers cannot hold tolerance at volume. Nobody told him that. He asked an AI which suppliers to consider, read the answer, and never clicked through, which is how most AI citations end. SparkToro found only 12 to 18 percent of Perplexity citations produce a visit. The doubt reached him invisibly.

No tool reports this. So ask your sales team something they can answer. On how many calls does a buyer raise that doubt before you do?

Say one in ten. Not clean, you cannot chart it. Also real. Now do the math where everyone sees it:

That is the argument for one page. Now the whole program.

Lead with money, not the channel. Three signals get you most of the way and none need a tracking rebuild. Run your ten buying questions through ChatGPT and Perplexity on the first Monday of the month and note whether you are named. Watch branded search in Search Console, because buyers who read about you go looking by name. Add one question to your inquiry form asking how they first heard of you. A spreadsheet and an hour a month is the honest cost of starting.

Our article on being named by AI covers the work that earns a citation. This is the part that keeps it funded.

Do this because every yuan you ask for gets measured against the Alibaba P4P spend next to it. P4P reports back in a day, in a currency the boss already reads. GEO never will. Untranslated, it loses that comparison every year no matter what the work is doing.

None of the three proves anything alone, though stacked together they get you to enough confidence to decide, which was always the realistic goal.

So before your next report, take every number on the page and ask whether it turns into revenue, risk, or pipeline. If it does not, you are asking the room to take your word for it, and the room has an Alibaba invoice in front of it that requires no faith at all.

One team, from brand to a named rep in market, building proof AI repeats and buyers act on.

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