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Guides for GEO reports, AI Focus Groups, scores, sharing, and the Partner API.

Focus Groups: Overview

An AI Focus Group is a moderated multi-persona simulation: synthetic buyers debate your offer across rounds, then the report compresses the session into Confidence and Idea scores, themes, objections, risks, and—when GEO-linked—blind competitor choice. Live UI examples below use sample numbers so you recognize the same controls in your report.

Report tabs

A completed session is organized into tabs: Overview, Discussion, Insights, Competitor choice (when choice data exists), Risks, and Transcript. Perception Affect Field appears when that pipeline ran. Confidence and Idea live in the report hero above the tabs.

Focus Group report tabs

Sample session for Northline Analytics — active: Overview

Example UI: Focus Group report section tabs.

How a focus group can be launched

There are two fundamentally different ways to run a session. Which one you use depends on whether you are exploring an idea on your own, or you want the platform to target weaknesses discovered in a GEO analysis and feed results back into that GEO report.

1. Manual (single) run from your dashboard

You configure the assignment yourself: the scenario, how many discussion rounds to run, how many personas participate, and persona attributes such as age range and gender. The system follows your brief.

This mode is ideal when you want to sharpen a product or narrative, test how an idea lands in conversation, and iterate quickly—both for “market” style reactions and for how AI-styled personas push back on claims.

2. Automatic run linked to a GEO analysis

When a focus group is triggered from GEO, the system uses your GEO results to infer where the company is comparatively weak. The moderator brief and discussion questions are generated from those weaknesses (curated themes only—not a dump of every GEO transcript)—not from a blank form you fill manually.

Participants do not know which brand is the subject of the study. The participant brief does not name your company. Choice options appear as unlabeled Option A/B/C… (your brand is shuffled into that set). Votes are remapped to real brand names for your GEO report and scoring.

3. Voting data back in the GEO report

For GEO-linked runs, aggregated voting and related outputs from the focus group are written back into the GEO report. That lets you connect “what generative answers look like” with “which brand simulated buyers pick when they compare alternatives”—in one analytical thread.

What the Overview tab in results shows

Once a session completes, Overview summarizes the synthetic run: rounds, participants, conflicts, objections, plus headline Confidence and Idea when present. It is the executive briefing for “did the simulation hang together and what is the headline verdict?”

Overview headline

Rounds

4

Participants

5

Conflicts

3

Objections

6

Confidence

72%

Idea

64%

Example UI: Overview KPI strip plus Confidence and Idea score donuts.

How it is built

The focus-group engine runs a moderated multi-persona dialogue against your brief (manual) or against a GEO-derived brief (linked). Counts are tallied from structured outputs and parsed transcript segments. Confidence and Idea scores compress many turns into headline percentages for tracking over time.

How to read the cards

  • High objections with low conflicts can mean “lots of skepticism but people stayed engaged”—good for sales enablement, less comfortable for brand.
  • Low rounds or thin personas may cap reliability—check the Participants section for depth.

How to interpret for action

Use Overview to decide whether to trust the rest of the tabs: if Confidence is low, read Discussion and Transcript cautiously and consider re-running with a clearer brief or stronger product context.