Generative engine optimization · free scan · no email

GEO audit: Generative Engine Optimization

A GEO audit checks whether generative engines can reach, read and cite your site. The practice is grounded in research: the GEO study (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024) found that "GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses." We fetch your pages raw, the way GPTBot and ClaudeBot do, and grade every citation signal inside our 164-check engine, worst first.

Generative engines do not rank your link in a list. They pick a source, quote a passage and show the answer. This audit tells you whether that source can be you, or whether something invisible is blocking you from every AI answer on your topic.

Free Visibility Scan: whole site, up to 150 pages, no email. Full Report is a one-time $10.

What it means

Two halves: can they reach you, and is there something worth quoting.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your content citable inside AI-generated answers. The term comes from the GEO study (arXiv 2311.09735), which tested specific content edits across real queries and measured how often each edited page was cited. Adding statistics, direct quotations and cited sources measurably increased citation frequency.

The practical work has two halves. First, the engine must be able to reach your site: your robots.txt has to allow the retrieval crawlers that fetch sources for AI answers, and your content has to appear in plain HTML without JavaScript. If either fails, you are invisible before any content quality question even matters. Second, the engine must find something worth quoting: a self-contained answer near the top, concrete statistics with sources nearby, headings that carve the page into liftable passages.

A GEO audit checks both halves. Read more about what GEO means and where the term came from in the full GEO guide. For the relationship between GEO and classic SEO, see AEO vs SEO.

What we check

The signals that decide generative engine citation.

AI crawler access · gate level

Failures here block everything else

  • GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot must be allowed at your root; a block means the engine cannot fetch you when a user asks a question
  • Full 15-bot policy matrix: OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, Perplexity-User, DuckAssistBot, plus training bots from Amazon, ByteDance, Common Crawl and others. Blocking training bots is a policy choice; blocking retrieval bots is lost visibility
  • Your site's AI posture, classified: open, closed, "index me, don't train me", or accidentally inconsistent
  • Content renders without JavaScript; retrieval crawlers do not run scripts
Citability & entity

What they find when they arrive

  • A self-contained answer in the first visible passage; AI engines quote passages that stand alone
  • Concrete statistics with a source nearby; the GEO study found sourced numbers among the strongest citability signals
  • Headings at intervals an AI can lift; an 800-word section without a heading is invisible as a unit
  • Headings phrased as the questions people actually ask
  • Consistent site name, URL and logo in structured data; machine-readable authorship
  • llms.txt: no vendor requires it, but it is a documented way to give AI crawlers a summary of your content
What you get

The exact robots.txt lines. The exact missing passages.

The free GEO audit scans your whole site, up to 150 pages, and names every failing check worst first: gate failures that prevent any citation, then core citability signals, then amplifier improvements. Each finding names the check, states a plain-language verdict, links to the grounding documentation and gives a specific fix.

You see the exact robots.txt lines that block or allow each AI crawler, whether your content arrives in HTML or only after JavaScript, how your top passage reads from a citation standpoint, and whether your structured data is complete enough for an AI engine to trust your entity claims. The $10 Full Report unseals page-by-page detail with a PDF, action plan and AI-ready fix file. Sibling audits: AEO audit, AI citation checker, and the AI search optimization hub.

Questions

Straight answers.

What is a GEO audit?

A GEO audit checks whether your site meets the conditions that generative AI engines require to cite it: AI crawler access (can GPTBot and ClaudeBot reach you?), content rendering (does your answer appear in raw HTML?), passage citability (is there something specific to quote?), and entity clarity (is it clear who you are?). It differs from a traditional SEO audit because it focuses on citation signals, not ranking signals.

Which AI engines does the GEO audit cover?

We check crawler access for GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot (Claude), PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User (Perplexity), Googlebot (AI Overviews), DuckAssistBot (DuckDuckGo) and others, 15 bots in total. Coverage reflects the engines most likely to generate answers from web sources.

Does "GEO audit" mean you check whether AI engines are citing me right now?

No. We audit the signals that determine whether you can be cited: crawler access, content structure, passage quality, schema. We read your site the way AI engines do and report what is missing. We do not monitor live AI answer outputs.

My site ranks well in Google. Why might I still fail the GEO audit?

Classic ranking and AI citability share a foundation (crawlability, indexability) but diverge on citability signals. A site that ranks well can still block AI retrieval crawlers in robots.txt, serve its answers only after JavaScript, or lack the passage structure an AI engine needs to extract a quotable answer. The GEO audit finds exactly those gaps.

What should I fix first if my GEO audit fails?

Fix gate failures first. If GPTBot or ClaudeBot is blocked by your robots.txt, or if your content only appears after JavaScript, nothing else matters yet. The audit report puts gate findings at the top of the fix queue. Fixing AI crawler access walks through the most common one.

Find out if the generative engines can cite you.

Free scan of your whole site, up to 150 pages. No email. Gate failures first.

164 graded checks · 15 AI bots by name · the audit that shows its work