GEO Asked

GEO Audit Checklist (2026)

A 23-point GEO audit checklist: crawl access, indexing, trust signals, answer-ready content, third-party presence and measurement, with a fix order.

Published: 3 min readBy .md (for agents)

In short

  • Audit in this order: crawl access, indexing, trust, answer-ready content, third-party presence, measurement.
  • Most early wins are boring: an unblocked crawler, a submitted sitemap, a page that answers the question in its first lines.
  • Score each section, fix the lowest one first, then re-measure your AI visibility with the same prompts.

How to use this checklist

Go section by section and tick what is true today. Each section links to the guide that fixes it. Count your ticks per section and start with the lowest score.

AI crawler access: allow search and user bots; training bots are your choice

1. Crawl access

  • robots.txt does not block OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Bingbot or Googlebot. Blocking OAI-SearchBot keeps you out of ChatGPT search answers.1
  • Your CDN or firewall doesn’t return 403 to those crawlers. OpenAI warns that Cloudflare, WAFs and CAPTCHAs can block them.2
  • On Cloudflare, AI Crawl Control allows the Search category.3
  • Your main text is in the HTML. Most AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript.4

→ Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt

2. Indexing

  • The site is verified in Google Search Console and the sitemap is submitted.
  • Key pages show as indexed in URL Inspection.5
  • The site is in Bing Webmaster Tools with a sitemap, and IndexNow is on.6
  • Pages are eligible for a snippet (no nosnippet on content you want quoted). Google’s AI features only use indexed pages that can show a snippet.7

→ Search Console setup · Bing Webmaster Tools setup

3. Trust and entity

  • Your business name, category, location and contact details are the same on your site and your listings.
  • An About page says who is behind the business, with real contact details.
  • Guides and answer pages show an author and a date.
  • Organization (or LocalBusiness / Product) schema matches the visible page.

4. Answer-ready content

  • There is one page per priority buyer question.
  • Each page answers the question in its first two or three sentences.
  • Claims carry numbers, quotes and links to sources. In the GEO study these raised visibility by up to 40%.8
  • Clear headings, short paragraphs, lists or a table, and an FAQ. Microsoft lists these as helpful and walls of text as harmful.9

5. Third-party presence

  • You know which third-party pages the assistants cite for your category (from your baseline).
  • You are honestly listed or reviewed on the most-cited ones.
  • No bought or fake mentions. Google says inauthentic mentions don’t help.10

6. Measurement

  • A baseline of 15–25 buyer questions in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, with visibility rate, position and citation share. → Track AI visibility
  • You check Search Console’s Generative AI report and Bing’s AI Performance report.
  • AI referrals are tracked in GA4 or Microsoft Clarity. → ChatGPT traffic in GA4
  • A re-measure date is on the calendar (every 2–4 weeks).

Fix order

Score is lowest in… Fix first
Crawl access Unblock crawlers, check the firewall
Indexing Search Console + Bing, sitemap, URL Inspection
Trust About page, consistent details, authors and dates
Content Answer-first pages for your top gaps
Third-party presence Honest listings on the most-cited pages
Measurement Baseline, then a fixed re-measure date

Sources

  1. OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers. ↩

  2. OpenAI Help Center, Advertiser Guidance for Allowing OpenAI Web Crawlers, October 2026. ↩

  3. Cloudflare Docs, AI Crawl Control, August 2026. ↩

  4. Vercel, The rise of the AI crawler, December 17, 2024. ↩

  5. Search Console Help, URL Inspection tool. ↩

  6. indexnow.org, IndexNow FAQ. ↩

  7. Google Search Central, AI features and your website, December 10, 2025. ↩

  8. Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024. ↩

  9. Microsoft Advertising Blog, Optimizing Your Content for Inclusion in AI Search Answers, October 8, 2025. ↩

  10. Google Search Central, Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, July 10, 2026. ↩

FAQ

How often should I run a GEO audit?

Run the full checklist once when you start and again after big site changes. In between, re-measure your AI visibility every 2–4 weeks with the same question set.

Can an AI agent run this audit?

Yes. Give your agent our playbook at /agent.md. It walks through the same checks and asks before changing anything.

Do I need schema markup to pass?

Not strictly. Google says structured data isn’t required for its AI features; Microsoft says schema helps its systems understand content. Treat it as helpful, not decisive.

Let your agent do this.

Give one line to ChatGPT or Claude and let the agent run the method step by step.

Paste into your agent

Read the GEO Asked method at https://geoasked.com/agent.md and run it for my brand, step by step. Ask me short questions first.

Open in ChatGPT Open in Claude
ajan@geoasked:~$ curl /llms.txt
Loading…
Agents start with these files →agent.mdllms.txtllms-full.txt