GEO audit
See how AI search sees your website
A GEO audit answers two questions: can ChatGPT, Gemini and the other AI engines reach and understand your site, and when a buyer asks them about your category, do they actually name you?
Free check: AI Readiness plus seven other categories, every issue listed, no card · updated October 6, 2026
19%
of buyer-style AI queries about their own category mentioned the average brand
43 sites with a full AI-visibility scan, our 2026 study
62%
of sites have no llms.txt — and it barely matters; crawler access and quotable answers do
162 sites, our 2026 study
90%
of sites state no AI usage policy at all; only 15% actually block AI crawlers
59 sites with an agent-readiness scan, our 2026 study
What the GEO audit checks
Nine checks, from the plumbing to the answers themselves. Each one shows up in the report as passed or failed, with what it costs you and, in a full audit, the fix for your stack.
1. AI crawler access
Your robots.txt rules for the bots that feed AI answers: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (ChatGPT), Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User (Claude), PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others.
Each assistant now runs separate bots for search, for fetching a page a user asked about, and for training. Blocking the search bot keeps you out of that assistant’s answers; a blanket rule written years ago for one scraper can do exactly that.
2. AI usage policy (Content Signals)
Whether robots.txt states how AI may use your content: search, answer input, training.
It is a stated preference, not an enforcement mechanism, and no AI company has committed to honouring it yet. It costs one line and makes your position explicit.
3. Structured data
Organization, product or service, article and breadcrumb markup, and whether it is valid.
Google says its AI features need no special markup, but structured data still tells every crawler unambiguously who you are, what you sell and what a page is about.
4. Content structure for AI
Headings that match real questions, answer-first paragraphs, lists and tables an assistant can lift without rewriting.
Assistants quote passages, not pages. A clear question followed by a direct answer is the unit they cite.
5. Answers to common questions
Whether the site answers the questions buyers actually ask: pricing, comparisons, who it is for, how it works.
FAQ rich results are gone from Google, but visible questions with direct answers are still exactly the material assistants extract when they build a reply.
6. Trust signals
About and contact pages, named people, reviews, policies, a real address where it matters.
Assistants prefer to recommend businesses they can verify. A site that hides who runs it is a weak candidate.
7. Agent readiness
Cloudflare’s agent-readiness scan: whether agents can discover your pages, read them as clean text or Markdown, and find your API or tools.
AI agents now browse and act for users. Most of this is early, so it carries little weight in the score; it tells you where you stand.
8. llms.txt
Whether the site publishes an llms.txt summary for AI tools.
Honest note: Google says its Search does not use llms.txt, and a 2026 Ahrefs study found 97% of these files got no requests at all. Some coding agents do read them. Worth ten minutes, not a strategy.
9. Real AI answers
Buyer-style prompts for your category run through ChatGPT and Gemini with live web search: are you mentioned, are you cited with a link, which competitors are named instead, and which sources the answers lean on.
This is the part that tells you whether any of the above is working. Readiness without mentions means the problem is off your site: lists, reviews and articles AI trusts do not include you yet.
What a GEO audit cannot tell you
AI answers vary between runs, users and countries, so eight prompts are a sample, not a census: read the result as a direction and watch the trend over weeks. Google’s Search Console now reports impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Bing Webmaster Tools shows Copilot citations; use them alongside the audit. And no audit can fix what is said about you elsewhere. If the answers cite list articles and reviews that leave you out, the work is getting onto them.
A GEO audit or an AI visibility tracker?
Trackers such as Otterly.AI, Peec AI or Profound run a fixed set of prompts on a schedule and chart your share of voice; they cost from about $29 a month to custom enterprise contracts, and they are most useful once you are already working on AI search. An audit starts one step earlier: it checks that your site is readable by AI at all, shows where you stand on the questions that matter, and tells you what to fix first. We compared both kinds in the best AI visibility and GEO tools for 2026.
Frequently asked
What is a GEO audit?+
GEO is generative engine optimization: being found, quoted and recommended by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. A GEO audit checks two things — whether those engines can reach and understand your site, and whether they actually mention and cite you when buyers ask about your category.
Is a GEO audit different from an SEO audit?+
They overlap. AI search engines still crawl pages and rely on search indexes, so technical SEO matters for both. A GEO audit adds what SEO tools usually skip: rules for AI crawlers, how quotable your content is, and real answers from AI assistants. Webmatik scores both in one report.
Is the GEO audit free?+
The free check scores AI Readiness with every other category and lists every issue it finds, three checks a month, no card. A full audit with one credit adds the fixes and a preview of real ChatGPT answers. The AI Visibility plan ($29/month) runs eight prompts through ChatGPT and Gemini on every audit, compares you with up to three competitors and re-checks your tracked sites every week.
Do I need an llms.txt file?+
It does no harm and takes ten minutes, but do not expect it to move AI visibility: Google says its Search does not use it, and large studies in 2026 found almost no AI crawler requests for it. Crawler access, clear answers on your pages and third-party mentions matter far more.
Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitors and not me?+
Usually because of what is written about you elsewhere. When ChatGPT searches the web for “best X”, it leans on list articles, reviews and comparison pages; if you are not on them, you are rarely in the answer however good your site is. The audit shows which sources the answers cite, so you know where to get listed.
How often should I run a GEO audit?+
After any change to robots.txt, your CDN or firewall settings, and otherwise monthly. AI answers change from week to week, which is why the AI Visibility and Growth plans re-check tracked sites on a schedule.
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