Part of our complete guide to AI search visibility.
A GEO audit asks a different question from a normal SEO audit: not "where do we rank?" but "when an AI engine answers a customer's question, does it find us, understand us, and quote us correctly?" Here's what a generative engine optimisation audit checks, and how to run one.
Search is splitting into two channels. One is the familiar Google results page. The other is the answer an AI assistant gives when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for a recommendation. A traditional SEO audit only measures the first. A GEO audit — generative engine optimisation — measures the second.
The two overlap on fundamentals like clean technical health and schema, but a GEO audit adds three things a classic audit ignores: whether AI crawlers can reach you, whether your content is structured to be quoted, and whether the engines actually mention you today. It runs in four stages.
Stage 1 — Crawl access: can AI engines reach you?
AI answer engines rely on their own crawlers and on Bing's index. If those are blocked, you're invisible before the race starts. Check that your robots.txt allows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, and — the step most small businesses miss — that your site is verified in Bing Webmaster Tools, since Bing feeds ChatGPT's web results. Our guide on why businesses are invisible to ChatGPT covers the common blockers in detail.
One robots.txt trap is worth checking even if your file looks fine. A crawler follows only the group that matches its own name most closely and ignores every other group. So if you add a separate block for GPTBot to “allow” it, that bot stops reading your general rules, including any Disallow lines you meant it to obey. We rewrote our own robots.txt as a single shared group in August for exactly this reason. Unless you really need different rules for one bot, a single group is safer:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /private-folder/
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xmlStage 2 — Structure: is your content built to be quoted?
AI engines lift short, self-contained answers out of pages. Audit whether your key pages:
- Answer the question in the opening line, then expand.
- Use clear, question-style headings that mirror how people ask.
- State facts plainly — prices, areas served, timeframes — rather than vague marketing lines.
- Carry correct schema markup so machines read your facts unambiguously.
This is the heart of GEO. If the terms are new, start with how GEO differs from SEO.
Stage 3 — AI mention test: do the engines cite you today?
This is the stage no traditional audit performs. Write 10–15 real customer questions for your category and location, ask each in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity from a logged-out session, and record whether you appear, how prominently, and whether the description is accurate. If you show up in fewer than two of every ten answers, you're effectively invisible. This test also produces your baseline AI visibility score. For a quick read before you do it by hand, the free AI visibility check runs this kind of test for you.
Keep the questions and the answers you recorded, not just the score. A score can move for the wrong reasons, so compare the actual answers each time you re-test. We wrote about that trap in when AI accuracy scores mislead.
Stage 4 — Score and fixes: turn findings into a plan
Finally, roll the findings into a prioritised list: crawler and indexing blockers first (they gate everything), then schema and structure, then the content depth and authority work that compounds over months. The point of a GEO audit isn't the score — it's the ordered set of fixes that moves it.
The authority work is the slowest part. Links from other trusted sites are part of it, and not every directory link counts. We tested which partner directories pass a real link in partner directories that actually link back.
Running it without the manual grind
Stages 1, 2 and 4 are a methodical review you can do by hand. Stage 3 — testing multiple engines across many prompts and scoring it consistently — is the fiddly part. Our free AI SEO audit automates the whole flow: it checks crawler access and schema, runs the AI-mention probes, and returns a scored report with ready-to-paste fixes and a 30-day plan. One free audit per business, no signup.
FAQ
What is a GEO audit?
A GEO (generative engine optimisation) audit checks whether AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity can reach your site, understand what your business does, and quote it accurately when people ask relevant questions. It's the AI-search counterpart to a traditional SEO audit.
How is a GEO audit different from an SEO audit?
An SEO audit optimises for ranking on a Google results page. A GEO audit optimises for being cited inside an AI-generated answer. They overlap on technical basics and schema, but a GEO audit adds AI-crawler access, answer-first content structure, and direct testing of whether AI engines mention you.
Can I run a GEO audit myself?
Yes. You can check AI-crawler access, review your schema, and manually test whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity mention you for real customer questions. An automated tool speeds up the AI-mention testing and scores the result consistently.