What a GEO audit tells you
Before spending anything on ongoing work, it is worth knowing where you actually stand. A GEO audit answers four questions, and the answers frequently change what a business decides to do next.
- Can the AI crawlers reach you at all? More sites block them by accident than people expect — and not in robots.txt, where you would look. Hosting-level bot protection can refuse them before the request touches your site, leaving nothing in your access logs. If this is the answer, nothing else matters until it is fixed.
- What do the assistants currently say about you? Asked properly, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, using the questions your customers actually use.
- Who gets named instead, and why? Usually the most uncomfortable and most useful section.
- Which sources do those answers cite? This is the practical output — it tells you precisely which sites you need to be present on.
What we check
| Checked | Why it matters | |
|---|---|---|
| Crawler access | Each major AI crawler, tested at the network level, not assumed from robots.txt | The single most common silent blocker |
| Index coverage | Google and Bing, page by page | Bing feeds ChatGPT search and Copilot, and is routinely unverified |
| Entity consistency | Name, address and phone across your site, profiles and directories | Answer engines corroborate before naming anyone |
| Structured data | Organisation, service, FAQ and breadcrumb markup, validated | Removes ambiguity about your facts |
| Answer baseline | Your ten customer questions, across four assistants, recorded | The only honest measure of where you start |
| Citation sources | Which sites the answers actually draw on | Turns a diagnosis into a to-do list |
| Content structure | Whether key pages answer questions directly enough to quote | Determines whether you get lifted or skipped |
You get the findings and the fixes in priority order, with the ones you can do yourself marked as such. A fair number usually can be.