GEO Audit
A GEO audit scores whether AI engines cite your site when your buyers ask. If ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews answer without you, the audit finds exactly why.
Your buyers stopped scrolling ten blue links. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews a question and read the answer. That answer cites three or four sources. A GEO audit tells you whether you are one of them.
GEO, generative engine optimization, is the practice of getting an AI engine to retrieve, trust, and cite your pages inside its answer. It is not the same as classic SEO. A page can rank on page one of Google and still be invisible to an AI engine, because the model decides what to quote on a different set of signals: structured facts, entity clarity, source authority, and machine-readable access.
I published the State of AI Search 2026 benchmark to measure this. I scored 61 SaaS sites on AI-search visibility. 67% scored 60 or below. The category is wide open, and most companies do not yet know they are losing the citation. A GEO audit is how you find out where you stand before your competitor does.
What a GEO audit actually checks
Citability: can a model lift a clean answer from your page?
AI engines quote self-contained, factual passages. Pages built as one long persuasive scroll give a model nothing to extract. The audit scores each key page for answer-ready blocks: a direct question, a direct answer, a real number, in the first 60 words of the section. This is the single highest-leverage GEO fix and the one almost no one ships.
Crawler access: can the AI bots reach you at all?
GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and Bingbot each fetch differently. A robots.txt rule, a JS-only render, or an aggressive bot wall can make your best content invisible to the exact crawlers that feed the answers. The audit tests live access per bot and flags anything blocked, throttled, or hidden behind client-side rendering.
Structured data: are your facts machine-readable?
Models lean on JSON-LD to resolve who you are and what you sell. The audit checks for valid, conflict-free Organization, Person, Service, FAQPage and Article schema, the sameAs identity graph, and speakable markup, then flags duplicate or contradictory nodes that confuse retrieval.
llms.txt and machine access surface
An llms.txt file gives engines a clean map of your most citable content. The audit checks whether you publish one, whether it is current, and whether it points at answer-ready pages. Mine is public at /llms.txt as a working reference, not a theory.
Entity presence: does the model know you exist?
An AI engine cites entities it can resolve. The audit checks your presence and consistency across Wikidata, Crunchbase, LinkedIn and the knowledge graph, because a model that cannot confirm who you are will cite a competitor it can.
Source authority and corroboration
Models prefer claims they can corroborate. The audit maps which of your key claims are backed by primary sources, third-party citations, or original data, and which are unsupported assertions a model will skip. Original data, the kind nobody else has, is the strongest citation magnet there is.
Live citation test across five engines
The audit runs your real buyer queries through ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Bing Copilot, and records who gets cited today. That is your baseline. See the GEO consultant overview for how the ongoing work moves that baseline.
Scored on the same rubric as the State of AI Search benchmark
The GEO audit does not score on opinion. It uses the rubric I built for the State of AI Search 2026 benchmark, the same one I ran across 61 SaaS sites.
That study found 67% of sites scored 60 or below on AI-search visibility. The scores clustered low not because the companies were small, but because GEO is new and almost no one has done the work yet. Your audit places you on that same 0-100 scale, so the number means something: you can see exactly how far ahead or behind your category you are, and the rubric shows which dimension is costing you the most.
The output is not a vanity grade. Every point of gap maps to a specific, prioritized fix, ordered by citation impact per hour of work. You get the score, the gap, and the build order. From there the work runs as the Citation Loop, the four-line delivery system behind GEO services: the audit is the entry point, not the product.
GEO audit deliverables
Your citability score, 0 to 100. One number, benchmarked against the State of AI Search dataset, so you know whether you are leading or trailing your category.
A per-dimension gap report. Each of the seven dimensions scored, with the specific pages and signals that are costing you citations.
A live citation baseline. Your real buyer queries run through five AI engines, with a record of who gets cited today, so next quarter you can measure the flip.
A prioritized fix list. Every gap ordered by citation impact per hour of work, so your team ships the changes that move the needle first, not the busywork.
An optional Weekly AI Answer Audit. The same query set re-run every week across all five engines, each answer checked for wrong pricing, wrong facts and competitor leakage. Most clients add it after seeing what the engines already get wrong about them.
The audit pairs with the technical side of the work. If your tracking cannot yet prove which channel drives revenue, start with server-side tracking so the GEO wins are measurable. To see the operator track record behind the rubric, read the case studies.
Evaluating consultants instead of running this yourself? Start with how to vet a GEO expert: a five-check rubric that works on anyone, including me.
For an instant self-serve check before the full audit, the free growth leak audit scores AI crawler access, citability, schema and llms.txt in 30 seconds.
Frequently asked questions about a GEO audit
What is a GEO audit?
A GEO audit scores whether AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews can retrieve, trust, and cite your site when your buyers ask a question. It checks seven dimensions: citability, crawler access, structured data, llms.txt, entity presence, source authority, and a live citation test across five engines. The output is a 0-100 score, a per-dimension gap report, and a prioritized fix list.
How is a GEO audit different from an SEO audit?
An SEO audit asks whether you rank in Google's blue links. A GEO audit asks whether an AI engine quotes you inside its answer. They overlap on technical health but diverge on what matters: GEO weights machine-readable facts, entity clarity, citable answer blocks, and direct crawler access over keyword density and backlinks. A page can rank on page one and still be invisible to ChatGPT.
Which AI engines does the audit test?
ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot. The audit runs your real buyer queries through each one and records who gets cited today, which becomes the baseline you measure improvement against.
How long does a GEO audit take and what do I do with it?
The audit itself is a fixed-scope diagnostic. You walk away with a score, a gap report, and a build order you can hand to your own team or have me execute. Because GEO is early, the highest-scoring fixes, citable answer blocks and clean structured data, are usually fast to ship and compound quickly while the category is still open.
Find out if AI is citing you or your competitor
The GEO audit gives you the score, the gaps, and the build order. The window is open now because almost no one in your category has done the work. Book the audit and find your number.