In the last few months, over 90% of our leads were coming through AI chatbots.
The funny thing is, our SEO performance has never been better. We rank high for some of our most important keywords. Organic traffic hit around 2,000 visits a month — a peak for us. By every traditional metric, things were going well.
But when new leads told us how they found us, the answer was almost always the same: ChatGPT, Claude, or Google’s AI Overviews.
That experience taught us something important: ranking well in traditional search and being recommended by AI are two different games. You can win one and still be invisible in the other.
A GEO audit is how you find out where you stand in the second game — and what it’s going to take to win it.
What is a GEO Audit?
A GEO (generative engine optimization) audit is an evaluation of how well a website is positioned to appear in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
It focuses on whether AI systems can:
- Crawl and access your content
- Understand your brand and entities
- Retrieve accurate information about your company
- Trust your site as a credible source
- Cite or mention your brand in AI-generated responses
Think of it as an SEO audit, but instead of asking “can Google find and rank this page?“, you’re asking “can an LLM find, understand, and confidently recommend this brand?“
The 5 Phases of a GEO Audit
| Phase | What it covers | Why it matters |
| Technical GEO Audit | Whether AI crawlers can access, render, and parse your content | If bots can't reach your pages, no amount of content or PR work will get you cited |
| Brand & Entity Audit | How your brand is defined, described, and associated with the right topics across AI platforms | AI models cite brands they can clearly identify and confidently categorize |
| Content Citability Audit | Whether your content is structured in a way that makes it easy for LLMs to extract and reference | AI models cite what they can cleanly retrieve — dense, unstructured content gets skipped |
| Offsite Presence & Reputation Audit | The quality and consistency of your brand mentions across third-party sites, publications, and listicles | LLMs use offsite signals to validate brand authority and decide whether a source is worth citing |
| AI Visibility Monitoring | Ongoing tracking of citation frequency, share of voice, AI referral traffic, and sentiment | AI outputs shift constantly — a one-time audit goes stale fast without a monitoring system in place |
Phase 1: Technical GEO Foundation
No amount of content optimization work will get you cited if AI can’t visit your pages in the first place.
The purpose of this audit is to make sure AI systems can access, crawl, and understand your content easily.
What to check:
- Is there any AI bot activity on your website? Check your server logs for visits from major AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, and Google-Extended. If none of these bots appear in your logs, it’s a strong signal that something is blocking them.
- Are your pages indexed by Google and Bing? LLMs frequently retrieve pages from both search engines during web fetching.
- Is Cloudflare blocking AI crawlers? If you use Cloudflare, check whether the AI bot blocking feature is enabled inside security settings.
- Is your robots.txt file blocking AI bots? Make sure it allows major AI bots like GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended to crawl your site.
- Does your site rely on JavaScript rendering? 69% of AI crawlers can’t execute JavaScript. If your site is built on a JavaScript-heavy framework, implement server-side rendering to fix this.
- Do your pages load fast? Use Google PageSpeed Insights to check your Core Web Vitals. Make sure they stay within the recommended thresholds.
- Does every page have a clean HTML structure? It should follow a logical heading hierarchy and contain well-organized sections with one main idea per paragraph.
- Have you implemented schema markup? Structured data helps engines understand and interpret your content more accurately.
- Does your domain have a llms.text file? An llms.txt file gives AI systems a plain-text summary of your site’s content and structure. It’s kind of like an XML sitemap for LLMs.
Phase 2: Brand & Entity Audit
AI systems do not “understand” brands the way humans do. They infer identity through repeated entity associations across trusted sources.
Your goal is to make every major entity around your company explicit, consistent, structured, and repeated across the web.
Core entities to check:
- Brand name. Is it written consistently across the web? LLMs may confuse “Apple” and “Apple Technologies” as two separate entities. Choose one canonical name and stick to it.
- Founder name(s). Is the founder name consistently linked to the company on the website, business directories, social media profiles, and guest post author bios
- Business category. Do you explicitly associate your brand name with your category in your own content? Don’t say “We are a CRM platform”, but say “HubSpot is a CRM platform.”
- Location(s). Whether you’re a local business or an international brand, state every country, city, and region that you serve.
- Product or service name. Your products and services should be treated as standalone entities — but always connect them back to your brand. For example: Google’s AI Overviews, Apple’s iPhone, Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, etc.
Where to check:
- Owned assets. Make sure your entities are consistent across your website, newsletter, social media profiles, YouTube channel, and other marketing channels you own.
- Google Knowledge Panel. Search your brand name and review what Google associates with your entity: company description, founders, social profiles, website, reviews, category, and related products. Incorrect or incomplete information here often propagates into AI systems.
- Business directories. Check Crunchbase, Clutch, G2, Capterra, Yelp, and industry directories for naming consistency, categories, locations, and descriptions.
- Social media. Make sure your LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook bios are up-to-date.
- Author bios & guest posts. Ensure every founder or employee bio consistently links the person back to the company using the same positioning language.
- Press mentions & podcasts. Review how journalists, hosts, and third-party sites describe your company and products. Correct outdated or inaccurate descriptions where possible
Phase 3: Content Citability Audit
AI models don’t read your content the way search engines do.
Instead of analyzing the whole page, LLMs scan for extractable answers — short, self-contained passages that can be pulled out and cited without additional context.
Your goal is to make every piece of content easy for AI to parse, extract from, and attribute accurately.
What to check:
- Does each page lead with its most important point? AI prioritizes content from the first 30% of a page. If your key claim, definition, or conclusion is buried after three paragraphs of background, AI may never reach it.
- Does every page follow a logical H1 → H2 → H3 structure? AI crawlers use your headings to build a semantic map of the page. A broken hierarchy distorts that map and reduces citation accuracy.
- Are your H2s phrased as questions (where natural)? For every section, open with a question and answer it directly in the first sentence. The Q&A structure mirrors how AI retrieves and surfaces information.
- Are your paragraphs short and self-contained? Stick to one idea per paragraph. If you’re making two points, write two paragraphs.
- Do you spell out entity names? AI learns context and associations through named entities. Avoid vague sentences like “This tool does this” or “We are a X company.” Instead, say “Ahrefs is an SEO tool that does this and that.”
- Does your content include facts and stats? Content with 5–7 statistics earns a 20% higher citation likelihood. The typical AIO-cited article also covers 62% more facts than the typical non-cited one.
- Does your content include expert insights? Including expert quotes with credentials can increase AI Overviews visibility by 78%. Pages with expert quotes also average 4.1 citations on ChatGPT versus 2.4 for pages without them.
Phase 4: Offsite Presence & Reputation Audit
AI models don’t just read your website.
They form opinions about your brand based on what the rest of the web says about you — third-party publications, review platforms, listicles, forums, and press mentions.
Your goal is to build a consistent, authoritative offsite footprint that AI models encounter repeatedly and trust enough to cite.
What to check:
- Are you included in listicles that AI cites? Getting featured in cited listicles can improve your chances of being recommended by AI systems, according to a Peec AI study.
- Are you covered by publications AI learns from? Various AI SEO studies suggest that LLMs learn from authoritative publications like Forbes, Business Insider, Nerdwallet, Investopedia, Value Penguin, and more.
- Is your brand being discussed in community forums? Reddit threads, Quora answers, and niche community forums are heavily indexed by AI models.
- Are you featured on review platforms? G2, Capterra, Clutch, and Trustpilot are high-authority sources AI models pull from when evaluating and recommending software and services.
- Are your brand mentions accurate? When multiple pages say the wrong things about you, those inaccuracies will get picked up by LLMs.
- Is there any negative sentiment about your brand? From Seer Interactive’s case, we can learn one thing: all it takes is one negative review from one customer to ruin your reputation in the age of AI.
Phase 5: Ongoing AI Visibility Monitoring
A GEO audit is not a one-time exercise.
AI models update frequently, new sources get indexed, competitors gain or lose citations, and your brand’s positioning in AI responses shifts constantly. What’s true today may not be true next month.
Your goal is to establish a monitoring system that tracks your AI visibility over time — so you can catch drops early, measure the impact of your optimizations, and stay ahead of competitors.
How to run it
Start by building a prompt list. These should reflect the real questions your target buyers are asking AI tools — not your brand keywords, but the problems your product solves.
Think: “What’s the best tool for [use case]?” or “Which agencies specialize in [your category]?“
Run those prompts across the platforms that matter most for your audience: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini. Document every response.
You can also use AI visibility tracking tools like Writesonic, OtterlyAI, and Semrush’s AI Toolkit to automate prompt tracking and track your brand visibility across platforms over time.
Core metrics to track:
- Citations. How often does your content get cited by AI engines? A high citation frequency suggests that AI can access, understand, and trust your content.
- Mentions. How many times does your brand get mentioned directly in AI answers? A direct mention suggests that AI recognizes your brand as a separate entity.
- Recommendations. How many times does AI actively suggest your brand as the solution to a user’s problem? A recommendation goes further than a mention — the AI is convinced that your product or service is the best suited for the user.
- Share of voice. How often is your brand cited and mentioned versus competitors?
- Sentiment. How does AI frame your brand? Is the mention positive, neutral, or negative?
Read our guide on how to monitor AI visibility to learn more.
Beyond tracking your AI visibility, you should also monitor how it directly impacts your business:
- AI referral traffic. Are users actually clicking through from AI citations to your site? Track direct referral traffic from AI platforms using Google Analytics.
- AI conversions. Are visitors arriving from AI referral traffic converting into leads or signups? To track this, ask people how they heard about your brand in your signup form.
The Next Step: Create a GEO Strategy
The GEO audit tells you where you stand. What you do with that information is what determines whether your brand shows up in AI answers.
Use your findings to build a GEO action plan.
For example, if you have zero AI visibility, launch a digital PR campaign to secure mentions from sites that AI frequently cites. Or, if AI is hallucinating facts about your brand, start updating your company details across the web.
If you’d rather have an expert run this for you, Position Digital offers full-scale GEO services. From GEO audit, strategy, and execution, we handle everything needed to get your brand cited, recommended, and trusted by AI.
Get in touch and let’s talk about AI search!
