The Presence Growth Engine
Five surfaces. One outcome.
Presence Growth is the discipline of growing a brand's presence everywhere a buyer looks and turning it into pipeline. CLEO is the engine that runs it.
Definition
Presence Growth is the discipline of growing a brand's presence on every surface a buyer looks at, Maps, Search, AI Search, Social and Reviews, and turning that presence into pipeline. The order matters: organic first, because organic presence is what converts, then paid, because paid extends the reach of what organic has already earned. It differs from AI visibility, which measures one surface, and from SEO, which builds one. Presence Growth starts at the crawl layer, because a site that machines cannot read cannot be ranked, cited or recommended, and it ends in the pipeline, because presence that does not produce a lead is a vanity metric. CLEO by RegenAI is the Presence Growth Engine: it reads the site the way a crawler does, writes the fixes into the CMS, publishes the content, earns the citations and reviews, amplifies that organic foundation with paid reach, and reports the lift.
Paid media buys reach. Organic presence decides whether it converts. Run together, they multiply.
Evidence
Why organic first
Organic presence lifts paid results three and a half times more than paid lifts organic. NYU Stern, Marketing Science, 2010.
Integrating brand and performance lifts revenue return by 25% to 100%. WARC, The Multiplier Effect, 2025.
About half of paid search clicks are not incremental where the brand already holds the top organic rank. Google Research, Search Ads Pause studies, 2012.
Reading the grid
Why paid follows
Presence comes three ways. Some of it you build: your pages, your profiles, your own site. Some of it you earn: the rankings, citations, reviews and mentions other people give you. And some of it you can rent: ads. All three end in the same place, a lead, and all three rest on the same foundation, a site a machine can actually read.
Search ads
A bought position above the ranked result. It appears the moment the budget does and disappears the moment it stops, which is the difference between renting the slot and holding the rank.
Sponsored answers
Space beside an AI answer, because no engine sells the answer itself. If the model already cites you, the sponsorship compounds a citation you earned; if it does not, it buys proximity to someone else's.
Social ads
Reach into feeds beyond your own followers, built from the trends the engine is already watching and targeted on the signals the listening layer already reads.
Sponsored listings
Placement among reviews you did not write, on platforms where the rating beside your name is the thing being read. The listing is bought; the rating is not.
Landing pages, retargeting
The one paid cell on a surface you own outright. It is the cheapest to run well, because the page is already yours and the crawl-layer work beneath it has already been done.
The same thing is true everywhere: paid buys the slot, never the standing. You can buy the space beside an AI answer, but not the citation inside it. You can buy a position above a search result, but not the rank underneath it. You can pay to appear among the reviews, but not the rating next to your name. Paid brings people; what they find when they arrive is what turns them into a lead. So the spend follows the evidence: held back on the queries you already rank for, because half of those clicks were yours anyway, and pointed instead at the answers, trends and signals that already convert - extending the reach of what organic has already earned rather than paying twice for it.
Summary
How CLEO does it
Maps
Your Google Business Profile kept accurate and current. Google reviews answered in your voice.
Search
Server-side fixes written into the CMS. No overlays, no tickets.
AI Search
Cited across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, Claude on eligible plans, then measured by GEO score.
Social
Heard across X, LinkedIn, Reddit, Medium, YouTube, Quora and Bluesky, published in your voice on X, LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Reviews
Watched and drafted for reply across G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, TrustRadius and Tripadvisor.
The scores on each surface are product diagnostics, measured on what your plan tracks. The CLEO Presence Index is measured separately, on the standard five-engine set.
Per surface
The five surfaces, in detail
One section each, not one line each: the real tool counts, tier gating and constraints behind the summary above.
Maps (Local)
Your Google Business Profile kept accurate and current, and every Google review answered in your brand voice. Google only, because that is where the local journey starts for most buyers.
Search
Seven fixes run by themselves today: meta tags, heading structure, redirects, image alt text, page speed, canonical tags and internal linking. Each is written straight into the source a machine reads, never injected by a script tag. CLEO writes to WordPress, Wix, Shopify and Sanity, and to custom code on Astro, React, Angular, Next.js, Vue and other frameworks, where the fix arrives as a commit or pull request through GitHub or GitLab. Orbit tells you at setup what it cannot touch on your stack.
AI Search
Seven engines are available on the standard plans - ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Bing AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and DeepSeek - with up to four running at a time. Grok and Meta AI are reserved for Enterprise and Enterprise+, the two most expensive engines to operate, which takes the total to nine. The CLEO Presence Index always uses the standard five-engine set, whatever your plan tracks for diagnostics.
Social
CLEO listens across seven platforms - X, LinkedIn, Reddit, Medium, YouTube, Quora and Bluesky - and publishes in your voice on three: X, LinkedIn and Bluesky. Each platform carries its own limit (X 280 characters, Bluesky 300, LinkedIn 3,000), and a partially posted thread is scored as partial, never as a total miss. The Social Score itself (a product diagnostic, not an index input) weights plan adherence at 35 points, volume at 30, breadth across platforms and responsiveness at 10 each, and audience growth and earned conversation at 5 and 10.
Reviews
Five platforms, a readiness score (a product diagnostic, not an index input) built from coverage, completeness and volume, and replies drafted in the brand voice for a human to post. Full methodology on the Reviews page.
A fix CLEO writes survives CLEO.
Your website | The crawl layer
CLEO writes to WordPress, Wix, Shopify and Sanity, and to custom code on Astro, React, Angular, Next.js, Vue and other frameworks, where the fix arrives as a commit or pull request through GitHub or GitLab.
CLEO is the Presence Growth Engine. It grows your brand's presence everywhere a buyer looks and turns it into pipeline.
Methodology
How the CLEO Presence Index works
One number, 0 to 100, for how present a business is wherever buyers look. Ten weighted signals in two layers: Presence Recognition at 70%, whether the business is found, trusted and recommended, and Presence Readiness at 30%, whether it can be reached and read.
Whether search engines, AI answers, reviewers and independent sources find, trust and recommend the business. Earned, and moves over weeks and months.
Whether search engines, AI systems and buyers can reach and read the business. Largely within the business's control, and changes within days.
GEO, SEO and Social are CLEO's own product diagnostics, each measuring what your plan tracks. The CLEO Presence Index is measured separately, the same way for every business, on a fixed panel and engine set, whatever your plan. Every signal is observable from outside the platform, on a shared category panel every business in the category is measured on. AI answers come from five engines, fixed for every business, weighted by use. Traffic, leads, pipeline and paid reach are reported alongside the index, from your connected data, and never inside it.
The bands:
85 to 100. A default answer across most of the category's questions.
65 to 84. Competitive presence across most surfaces.
40 to 64. Foundations in place. Recognition is inconsistent.
0 to 39. Rarely found or recommended. Significant room to grow.
Rated is 80% or more coverage with a grade shown, Provisional is 50 to 79% with the index shown and no grade, Unrated is below 50% with only live signals shown. A grade changes only after the smoothed index has stayed at least 1.5 points beyond a band boundary for 7 consecutive days.
Read the full methodology →Rigour
What we do not count
AI answers score 1, 0.5 or 0
In AI Recommendation, an answer that recommends the business scores 1, one that names it without recommending it scores 0.5, and one that omits it scores 0.
Negative mentions are excluded
An answer that names the business negatively scores 0 in AI Recommendation, and negative coverage is not counted in Independent Mentions.
The same engines for everyone
Every business is measured on the same fixed set of five engines, so comparisons are always like for like, whatever engines your plan tracks.
Press and paid placements
Press releases, wire syndication and paid or sponsored placements earn nothing on their own.
Your own channels
Your own channels never count as independent mentions.
Connected data
Connected analytics and Search Console never enter the index. Paid reach is outside the index.
Crawlers and llms.txt
Blocking AI training crawlers is reported, not penalised. An llms.txt file is reported, not scored.
Social activity
Social activity is not measured in v1.0, only linked profiles (open question 3 in the methodology).
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
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