GEO Audits: Is Your Site Ready for AI Search?

TL;DR: We built a GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) audit tool that grades your site's AI search readiness. It checks 15+ factors across four categories: machine scannability, technical SEO, content structure, and API readiness. Most sites score a C or below. The fix usually isn't hard—it's just that nobody's checking.

You optimized for Google. Cool. But when someone asks ChatGPT about your product category, do you show up?

Probably not.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: the things that make you rank on Google aren't the same things that make AI cite you. Google reads your page and ranks it. AI reads your page, understands it (or tries to), and decides whether it's worth quoting.

That "understanding" part? Most sites are making it unnecessarily hard.

What We Found Building This

We've been tracking AI citations for months. Patterns emerged fast:

Sites that get cited consistently have a few things in common. They're not doing anything revolutionary. They're just... structured well. Clean headings. JSON-LD that actually validates. FAQ sections. Content that's easy to extract.

Sites that never get cited? They're often doing fine on Google. But their pages are walls of text with no structure, broken schema, or worse—they're blocking AI crawlers entirely.

The gap isn't talent or budget. It's awareness. Nobody was checking this stuff.

So we built a tool that does.

How GEO Audits Work

Point it at your domain. We grab your sitemap, analyze up to 25 pages, and grade you across four categories:

Machine Scannability (35% of score)

Can AI actually parse your content?

JSON-LD presence: Do your pages have structured data at all?
JSON-LD validity: Does it validate, or is it missing required fields?
Heading hierarchy: Is there a clear H1 → H2 → H3 structure?

This is the big one. If your structured data is broken or missing, AI systems have to guess what your page is about. They don't like guessing.

Technical SEO (25% of score)

The basics that affect crawlability:

Sitemap exists: AI crawlers use sitemaps to discover pages
AI crawler access: Are you blocking GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, or PerplexityBot in robots.txt?
Meta descriptions: Present on all pages?
Open Graph tags: Complete og:title, og:description, og:image?
Publication dates: Freshness signals matter

Quick sanity check: go look at your robots.txt right now. If you see User-agent: GPTBot followed by Disallow: /, you've opted out of AI search entirely. Intentional or not, that's a choice.

Content Structure (25% of score)

Is your content formatted in ways AI loves to cite?

FAQ sections: AI systems eat these up. Easy to extract, easy to quote.
Comparison tables: Structured data that answers "X vs Y" queries.
Pros/cons lists: Balanced perspectives that AI can reference.

Here's the thing: you don't need all of these everywhere. But if you have zero across your entire site, you're leaving citations on the table.

API Readiness (15% of score)

How machine-readable is your content overall?

Schema type coverage: Do you have Article, Product, Organization, FAQPage schemas where appropriate?
Product pricing: If you sell things, is pricing in your schema?

This category matters more for e-commerce and product sites. Content sites can score well without it.

What the Grades Mean

A (90+): You're doing the work. Keep it up.
B (80-89): Solid foundation, a few gaps to close.
C (70-79): Average. You're visible but not optimized.
D (60-69): Below average. Several areas need attention.
F (<60): Major issues. Likely invisible to AI search.

Most sites we've audited land in C territory. That's not terrible—it just means there's low-hanging fruit.

Page-by-Page Breakdown

The aggregate score is useful, but the real value is seeing which pages are dragging you down.

We show every page we scanned with:

Title and URL
H1 present? FAQ section? JSON-LD count?
Word count
Expand any row to see: heading structure, all detected schemas, Open Graph data

That granularity matters. Your homepage might score great while your blog posts have zero structured data. Or your product pages have JSON-LD but it's invalid. You can't fix what you can't see.

The Priority Fixes

After running the audit, we rank your issues by impact and effort:

High impact, low effort: Add meta descriptions to pages missing them
High impact, medium effort: Fix invalid JSON-LD schemas
High impact, high effort: Add FAQ sections to key pages

We're not going to tell you to rebuild your site. Most fixes are additive. Add a schema here, fix a heading there, unblock a crawler.

Why This Matters Now

AI search is growing fast. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews—they're all pulling from the web and synthesizing answers.

The sites that get cited share one thing: they made it easy. Easy to crawl, easy to parse, easy to quote.

GEO audits tell you whether you're in that group or not. And if not, exactly what to change.

Try It

GEO Audits are available now in your project dashboard under Tracking → GEO Audit.

Run your first audit. See your grade. Fix the gaps.

Already tracking AI citations? This complements that perfectly. Citations tell you if you're getting quoted. GEO audits tell you why you might not be.

Want to audit your site's AI search readiness? Sign up for free and run your first GEO Audit.