A free GEO audit is a check of whether generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Microsoft Copilot can read your site, trust your content and cite it in their answers, and you can run one yourself in about 90 minutes.
GEO stands for generative engine optimisation, which is the work of making your content more likely to be used and cited when an AI writes an answer.
The term comes from a 2023 research paper called "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", and several of the checks below come straight from what that paper tested.
This page is the operator walkthrough, so you get ten checks, the exact order to run them and a 20-point scorecard you can fill in as you go.
If you'd rather have my team look at your AI visibility with you, book a free strategy session and get a competitor gap analysis.
That session works like a free GEO audit conversation, because you leave with a visibility plan, a roadmap and an explanation of why competitors appear more often.
What A Free GEO Audit Checks
A normal SEO audit asks whether Google can rank your page.
A GEO audit asks a different question, which is whether an AI that is writing an answer will choose your content as one of its sources.
That choice depends on access, on whether your page says something worth quoting and on whether the rest of the web agrees with what you say about yourself.
So the audit runs at three levels, which are your site, your most important pages and your brand across the wider web.
Where GEO Comes From: The 2023 Research Paper
The term GEO was introduced in a paper called "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization".
The authors are Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande.
It was submitted to arXiv on 16 November 2023, and the arXiv listing notes that it was accepted to KDD 2024.
The researchers built a benchmark of 10,000 queries called GEO-bench and tested nine ways of rewriting web content.
Their best methods were adding citations to credible sources, adding quotations and adding statistics, which gave a 30 to 40 percent relative improvement on their main visibility measure.
Keyword stuffing, which is the old SEO habit of repeating search terms, gave little to no improvement.
They also tested on Perplexity and reported visibility improvements of up to 37 percent there.
I'd treat these results as a direction rather than a promise, because the experiments used the models of 2023 and today's engines have changed a lot since.
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The 10 Free GEO Audit Checks
| # | Check | Level | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI crawler access | Site | An engine that can't read your page can't cite it. |
| 2 | Index and snippet eligibility | Site | Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode only link pages that are indexed and snippet-eligible. |
| 3 | Current AI citations | Site | Real citation data shows where you already win. |
| 4 | Citation-worthy answers | Page | Engines lift passages that answer the question clearly. |
| 5 | Statistics with sources | Page | The GEO paper found adding statistics improved visibility. |
| 6 | Quotations from credible sources | Page | The GEO paper found adding quotations improved visibility. |
| 7 | Citations to credible sources | Page | The GEO paper found citing sources was one of the best methods. |
| 8 | No keyword stuffing | Page | The GEO paper found keyword stuffing gave little to no improvement. |
| 9 | Brand consensus across third-party sites | Brand | AI platforms look for consistent signals across the wider web. |
| 10 | Freshness and accuracy | Brand | Bing says accurate, up-to-date content matters for AI citations. |
Score each check 0 for missing, 1 for partly there and 2 for solid, which gives you a total out of 20.
📞 Want a strategist to run these checks against your competitors? Book a free strategy session with Goldie Agency and leave with a custom visibility plan, a clear AI visibility roadmap and a competitor gap analysis. → Claim your free strategy session
Part A: The Site-Level Checks (About 20 Minutes)
Check 1: AI crawler access
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for any rule that blocks the crawlers you care about.
OpenAI's documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and it recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot if you want to appear.
Perplexity's documentation recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt if you want to appear in its search results.
Google's guidance says crawling should be allowed in robots.txt and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure, so ask your host about firewall rules too.
Score 2 if every crawler you want is allowed, 1 if you're unsure about the CDN and 0 if any of them is blocked.
Check 2: Index and snippet eligibility
Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
Use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to check your five most important pages.
Score 2 if all five are indexed, 1 if some are and 0 if most aren't.
Check 3: Current AI citations
This is where most people stop guessing and start measuring.
Set up Bing Webmaster Tools and open its AI Performance report, which Microsoft calls an early step toward GEO tooling.
It shows total citations, average cited pages, the grounding queries behind them and which of your pages get cited across Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and select partners.
Then ask five real buyer prompts in Perplexity, ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, and note whether your pages appear among the sources.
Score 2 if you're cited regularly, 1 if you're cited occasionally and 0 if you can't find a single citation.
Part B: The Page-Level Checks (About 45 Minutes)
Run checks 4 to 8 on your five most important pages, which are usually your homepage, your main service or product pages and your best guide.
Check 4: Citation-worthy answers
Read the first two sentences of each section on the page.
A citation-worthy section answers a real question directly and still makes sense if an AI lifts it out on its own.
My own rule is to put the answer inside the first sentence and keep it under fifty words.
Check 5: Statistics with sources
Count the specific numbers on the page and check whether each one says where it came from.
Bing's own guidance says examples, data and cited sources help build trust when content is reused in AI-generated answers.
A page full of vague claims like "lots of customers" scores 0, while a page with dated, sourced figures scores 2.
Check 6: Quotations from credible sources
Look for quotes from named experts, customers or official documents, with the source named next to them.
The quote has to be real and attributed, because an invented quote is worse than no quote at all.
Check 7: Citations to credible sources
Check whether the page links out to the primary sources behind its claims, such as official documentation, research or the original data.
Citing sources was one of the three best methods in the GEO paper, and it's also simply good practice.
Check 8: No keyword stuffing
Read the page out loud and listen for the same phrase repeated in an unnatural way.
If you hear it, rewrite those lines, because the paper found keyword stuffing gave little to no improvement in generative engines.
This prompt speeds up checks 4 to 8 on any page.
Page GEO check prompt:
Read the page text below and act as a strict editor.
1. Quote the first sentence of each section and say whether it directly answers a question.
2. List every number on the page and say whether a source is named for it.
3. List every quotation and say whether the speaker or source is named.
4. List every outbound citation and say what kind of source it points to.
5. List any phrase that is repeated in a way a normal writer wouldn't repeat it.
Do not rewrite the page, and do not invent sources.
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Part C: The Brand-Level Checks (About 25 Minutes)
Check 9: Brand consensus across third-party sites
This is the check most site owners never run, and it's the one I'd weight most heavily.
Goldie Agency's strategy session page says AI platforms don't recommend brands simply because those brands publish more on their own websites.
It says they look for consistent signals across the wider web, and that trusted publications, expert articles, independent reviews, comparisons and credible third-party references help create a clear consensus around who you are.
So search for your brand name and list the first twenty outside pages that mention you, such as reviews, directories, comparisons, interviews and community threads.
Check whether they describe your services, location and positioning the same way your own site does.
I treat community threads and videos as part of that footprint too, which is why I publish on YouTube every day.
Score 2 if the outside pages broadly agree with you, 1 if they're thin or mixed and 0 if they contradict you or barely exist.
Check 10: Freshness and accuracy
Bing's guidance says accurate and up-to-date content is important for inclusion and citation in AI-generated answers.
Check the visible date on your key pages, your prices if you publish them, your team and your service list.
Google also tells site owners to keep their Merchant Center and Business Profile information up to date, which is where many stale local facts come from.
Use this prompt to compare outside descriptions with your own facts.
Brand consensus prompt:
Below is my brand fact sheet, followed by text from 20 outside pages that mention my brand.
For each page, list what it says about my services, location, prices and positioning.
Mark each statement as matching, conflicting or missing compared with my fact sheet, and quote the line that proves it.
Finish with the three outside pages I should ask to update first.
Your Free GEO Audit Scorecard
| Check | Score (0, 1 or 2) | Evidence | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. AI crawler access | | robots.txt checked on [DATE] | |
| 2. Index and snippet eligibility | | URL Inspection results | |
| 3. Current AI citations | | Bing AI Performance plus 5 prompt tests | |
| 4. Citation-worthy answers | | First sentences reviewed on 5 pages | |
| 5. Statistics with sources | | Numbers and sources counted | |
| 6. Quotations from credible sources | | Quotes and attributions listed | |
| 7. Citations to credible sources | | Outbound sources listed | |
| 8. No keyword stuffing | | Repeated phrases found | |
| 9. Brand consensus | | 20 outside pages compared | |
| 10. Freshness and accuracy | | Dates and facts checked | |
| Total | /20 | | |
Fix the lowest site-level score first, then the page-level checks on your most valuable page, then the brand-level work, which takes the longest.
📞 Scored low on brand consensus? Grab a free strategy session and get a strategy built around your brand, covering the bylines, reviews, comparisons, research and authority placements that fit your market. → Book your free session
What A Free GEO Audit Can't Tell You
A free GEO audit tells you what to improve, but it can't tell you exactly how any engine will weigh those improvements.
The GEO paper measured visibility gains in controlled experiments, which is useful evidence but not a guarantee for your site.
Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode, so anyone selling a secret GEO file or special schema is ignoring the official guidance.
Nobody can guarantee what a generative engine will cite, and that includes me and my agency.
Related Reading
- My free AEO report guide shows how to measure share of answers once your GEO fixes are live.
- The combined free SEO and GEO audit puts classic SEO checks and GEO checks side by side.
- My AEO audit walkthrough covers the answer engine side in more depth.
- What an AI SEO optimization agency does explains the work if you'd rather hire it out.
Also On Our Network
- 🌐 Four ways a business can use a free GEO audit
- 🌐 Every GEO audit check rated by the strength of its evidence
- 🌐 How to run a free GEO audit every month from your Agent OS
- 🌐 The generative engines behind GEO and how their models score
FAQ: Free GEO Audit
What is a free GEO audit?
A free GEO audit checks whether generative AI engines can read your site, trust your content and cite it in their answers.
It covers crawl access, current citations, citation-worthy content, statistics, quotations, sources, keyword stuffing, brand consensus and freshness.
Where does the term GEO come from?
The term comes from the paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande.
It was submitted to arXiv in November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024.
What free tools can I use for a GEO audit?
Bing Webmaster Tools has a free AI Performance report that shows how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries.
You can also check robots.txt, use Google Search Console and test real prompts in Perplexity, ChatGPT and Google AI Mode.
Is the free strategy session a free GEO audit?
It works like a free GEO audit conversation, because you get a custom visibility plan, an AI visibility roadmap and a competitor gap analysis.
It's a live call rather than a written report or an automated tool.
Can a GEO audit guarantee AI engines will cite my site?
No, because nobody can guarantee what a generative engine will cite.
The research behind GEO measured improvements in visibility, not guaranteed placements.
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About Julian
I'm Julian Goldie, an SEO entrepreneur, author and founder of the AI Profit Boardroom, which has 3,400+ members.
I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation and SEO.
- I started Goldie Agency on my own, and it is now a 7-figure SEO and link-building agency with 70+ people.
- I've grown my YouTube channel to 400,000+ subscribers.
- I wrote "Link Building Mastery".
- My Udemy courses have taught 29,000+ students.
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Run the ten checks this week, book a free strategy session if you want a plan for traffic, mentions and leads, and repeat your free GEO audit every quarter.
