What is a GEO audit?
A GEO audit checks whether AI search can read and understand a website and name it for relevant questions. A good audit separates technical prerequisites from the actual measurement of whether the brand appears in real answers, and provides evidence for both.
The technical side starts with access: does robots.txt allow the AI crawlers, and does the server actually deliver the page to them, or does bot protection silently block them? Then comes rendering. Is the content in the raw HTML, or does it only appear after JavaScript that many crawlers do not execute?
The content side asks whether the brand is unambiguous as an entity, whether pages answer questions in citable sections and in which external sources the brand appears. Measures without proven effect, such as llms.txt or extra schema markup, should be labelled as such and not counted as requirements.
The core is the citation test: asking engines real buying-intent questions and recording who gets named. Because answers vary between runs, a single run only proves that a brand appeared, not reliably that it is absent. An audit that only outputs a score without showing the answers cannot be verified.
What it means for your website
Individual parts can be checked for free, for example with a test of whether GPTBot and ClaudeBot reach your homepage and a live check of whether ChatGPT names your website for a buying-intent question. When comparing vendors, ask whether they show the wording of the answers and how often they ask each question.
Sources
Terms help you understand. Whether AI crawlers can reach your site is something you measure.
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