How to Run a GEO Audit on Your Website

Before you spend money fixing your website for AI search, it helps to know exactly what is broken. That is what a GEO audit does. It checks whether tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can actually find, read and trust your content, instead of guessing where to start.

This guide walks through a GEO audit step by step, so you can run one yourself or know exactly what to ask for if someone runs one for you. By the end you will have a working generative engine optimisation checklist you can reuse every few months.

What Is a GEO Audit?

A GEO audit is a step-by-step check of how well AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can find, read, trust and quote your website. It looks at technical access, content structure, trust signals and current visibility, then sets out exactly what to fix.

GEO stands for generative engine optimisation: shaping a website so AI bots and answer engines can read, trust and quote it. Our full guide on generative engine optimisation explains the strategy behind it. The discipline traces back to a peer-reviewed study from Princeton University and collaborating institutions, presented at KDD 2024, which first measured how different content strategies affect visibility in AI-generated answers.

A GEO audit is not the same as checking your Google ranking. It asks a different set of questions. Can an AI crawler reach your pages at all? Does your content give a direct answer? Does your business look trustworthy to a machine reading it cold? And are you already being mentioned when people ask AI tools about your industry?

Step 1: Check Whether AI Crawlers Can Access Your Site

Most businesses skip this step, and it matters more than any other. A blocked crawler means total invisibility in that engine, no matter how good your content is.

Open your robots.txt file and check whether it blocks any of these:

• GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User (OpenAI)
• PerplexityBot (Perplexity)
• Google-Extended (Gemini)
• ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai (Anthropic)
• Bingbot (feeds both ChatGPT Search and Microsoft Copilot)
• CCBot (Common Crawl, which many models draw on)

Bingbot is the one to check twice. Plenty of sites optimise for Google and quietly neglect Bing, without realising it feeds two major AI engines. A site can look perfectly healthy to a human visitor while blocking half the tools you want quoting you. Google’s documentation on robots.txt is a useful reference if you are reading these rules for the first time.

Also confirm your key pages are not marked noindex, and that your sitemap is current and submitted. Our guide on ranking in Google AI Overviews covers the technical groundwork underneath this.

Step 2: Review How Your Content Is Structured

AI tools favour clear, direct answers over long, winding explanations. This step checks whether your pages are actually built that way.

Take your top pages and ask one question of each: if someone put this page’s core question to an AI tool, could the tool lift a clean, accurate answer out of it? Pages with clear headings, short paragraphs and the answer near the top of each section perform far better than pages that bury the point under a long introduction. Precision beats length here. A short, specific answer gets picked up over a long, vague one.

Blog posts are the right place to start, since that is usually where the gaps show first. Our page on optimising your website for ChatGPT and Perplexity covers the structural changes that help, including heading structure and schema markup. Adding structured data as part of this step? Check Schema.org directly rather than trusting a plugin’s default settings.

Step 3: Check Your Trust and Authority Signals

AI tools carry reputational risk when they recommend a business, so they lean toward sources that look trustworthy. This step checks whether your site gives them a reason to.

Look for clear authorship, real staff bios, visible business details, genuine reviews and mentions of your business on other websites. A page with no named author, no clear business information and no outside validation gives an AI tool very little to work with. Our guide on E-E-A-T for AI search breaks down which trust signals carry the most weight.

Internal linking matters here too. Pages that link to each other in a logical way help an AI system understand how your content fits together, so your site argues for itself as a whole rather than leaving each page to prove itself alone.

Step 4: Test Your Current AI Visibility

This step tells you where you stand right now, before any fixes.

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Ask each one a handful of real questions a customer might ask about your industry and area, phrased the way a customer would phrase them. Note three things: whether the answer mentions your brand, whether the details are accurate, and which source the answer appears to draw from.

That last detail is the useful one. A mention sourced from a review site tells you your reviews are doing the work. No mention at all tells you the retrieval step never found you.
Doing this by hand works for a quick check. For ongoing tracking, our comparison of AI visibility tools covers the platforms built to monitor AI citations automatically.

A Simple GEO Audit Checklist

What Do You Do With the Results?

An audit is only useful if it leads somewhere. Fix the technical problems first, because a crawler-access issue blocks everything else no matter how strong your content is. Then move to content structure and trust signals. Those take longer to build but have the biggest lasting effect on how often AI tools mention your brand.

Our 90-day AI search strategy plan walks through how to turn audit findings into a staged plan rather than trying to fix everything at once.

How Is This Different From a Normal SEO Audit?

The two overlap, but they are not the same. A traditional SEO audit checks keyword targeting, backlinks and ranking position. A GEO audit checks whether AI tools can read, trust and quote your content directly, which calls for a different set of technical and content checks.

Our comparison of GEO vs SEO explains where the two disciplines share fundamentals and where they diverge.

Key Takeaways

• A GEO audit checks four areas: crawler access, content structure, trust signals and current AI visibility.
• A blocked AI crawler makes the rest of the audit irrelevant until it is fixed.
• Bingbot deserves particular attention, since it feeds both ChatGPT Search and Copilot.
• Content written for direct answers gets quoted more often than long, indirect explanations.
• Testing across several engines gives a far more accurate picture than checking one.
• Findings should feed a staged plan, not an all-at-once scramble.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a GEO audit?

A GEO audit is a step-by-step check of how well AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can find, read, trust and quote your website. It covers technical access, content structure, trust signals and current visibility.

How is a GEO audit different from an SEO audit?

An SEO audit focuses on ranking factors like keywords and backlinks. A GEO audit focuses on whether AI tools can access and trust your content well enough to quote it directly in a generated answer.

How often should I run a GEO audit?

Every three to six months suits most businesses, since AI platforms and their crawling behaviour change often. Fast-moving or highly competitive industries benefit from checking more frequently.

Can I run a GEO audit myself?

Yes, at least the basic version. Checking robots.txt, reviewing content structure and testing visibility across a few AI tools all work without special software. Ongoing automated tracking usually needs a dedicated tool.

What tools do I need for a GEO audit?

At minimum, access to your robots.txt file and sitemap, plus free accounts on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Bing Webmaster Tools is worth adding, since Bing feeds two major AI engines.

Which AI crawlers should I allow?

Allow GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User for OpenAI, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, Google-Extended for Gemini, ClaudeBot for Anthropic, and Bingbot, which serves both ChatGPT Search and Copilot. CCBot feeds Common Crawl, which many models draw on.

Ready to Find Out Where You Stand?

A GEO audit gives you a clear, honest picture of how visible your business actually is in AI search, rather than a guess.

Aus Asia Online has worked on search visibility for Australian businesses for over fifteen years, and we hold a 5.0 rating from more than 95 Google reviews. Get in touch to talk through a full GEO audit for your website, or call 1300 189 687.