What Is a GEO Audit? How to Check If AI Engines Can Find and Trust Your Business
A GEO audit checks whether AI engines can find, understand, trust, work with and cite your business, and shows you what to fix first. It scores five dimensions: findability, understandability, trustworthiness, agent-readiness and citability. You can run a useful version yourself in an afternoon, or commission a professional audit that benchmarks you against named competitors and prioritises the fixes by payback. Either way, the output that matters is a short, ordered list of what to fix first.
A GEO audit tests how well AI engines can find, understand, trust, work with and cite your business, and it shows you what to fix first. Where an SEO audit asks whether Google can rank your pages, a GEO audit asks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews will name you in the answer they write.
The two overlap, but they are not the same test. A GEO audit is sometimes called an AI visibility audit. It matters because buyers now research with AI before they reach you: 94% of B2B buyers use AI assistants during their buying journey (6sense, 2025), and among B2B software buyers, 69% chose a different vendor than they first intended after an AI chatbot's guidance, with one in three buying from a vendor they had never heard of (G2, 2026). This guide explains what a GEO audit checks, how to run a basic one yourself, and where a professional audit earns its fee.
Why a GEO audit is different from an SEO audit
An SEO audit checks whether your site can rank: titles, headings, links, speed, crawlability. A GEO audit checks all of that, then adds the questions AI engines ask before they cite a source. Can the engine pull a clean answer from your page? Does it understand who you are and what you are an authority on? Does it trust you enough to put your name next to the answer?
A page can pass an SEO audit and still fail a GEO audit. It ranks, but the writing is too tangled to quote, the identity is muddled, or nothing on the page is worth citing. The GEO audit catches the gap between being findable and being the answer.
What a GEO audit checks
A thorough GEO audit scores five dimensions. They are the questions every AI engine works through before it names a business.
- Findability. Can AI crawlers reach and read your pages at all?
- Understandability. Is your content clear and structured enough for an engine to extract a clean answer?
- Trustworthiness. Do your identity, credentials and third-party mentions give an engine reason to trust you?
- Agent-readiness. Can an AI agent navigate your site, use your forms, and complete a task on a buyer's behalf?
- Citability. Is there anything on your pages, original data or a clear point of view, worth quoting and crediting?
Most businesses score well on one or two dimensions and poorly on the rest. The value of the audit is finding out which, so effort goes where it pays back.
How to run a basic GEO audit yourself
You can get a useful read in an afternoon. Four checks cover most of it.
- Ask the engines. Type your buyers' questions into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, with two or three competitors named. Record whether you are mentioned, how accurately, and who is named instead.
- Check you are not blocking the crawlers. Look at your robots.txt and make sure it does not block the AI crawlers you want to reach you. A page no crawler can read cannot be cited.
- Check your structure and identity. Read your key pages as an engine would. Does each section lead with a clear answer? Is it obvious who you are and what you do? Is your identity consistent across your site, LinkedIn and your listings?
- Check for something worth quoting. Look for original data, specific numbers, or a clear point of view. If every page reads like generic advice, an engine has no reason to credit you over anyone else.
One thing you can skip: chasing an llms.txt file. It is promoted as essential, but I have tested it and the evidence that AI crawlers fetch it is thin. The four checks above matter far more.
What a professional GEO audit adds
The DIY version tells you roughly where you stand. A professional audit tells you what to fix first, and proves it.
Three things separate the two. A professional audit benchmarks you against named competitors, so you see the gap, not just your own score. It scores each dimension consistently, so the findings are comparable and defensible. And it prioritises the fixes by payback, so you spend effort on the few changes that move your visibility, not the twenty that feel productive. That prioritisation is the judgement an audit is really buying: knowing what to fix first.
What to do with the results
A GEO audit is only worth running if it ends in a plan. Whether you run it yourself or commission one, the output should be a short, ordered list: the highest-value gap first, the reason it matters, and the fix.
Frequently asked questions
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Q.01
How much does a GEO audit cost?
It ranges from free, if you run the DIY checks yourself, to several thousand pounds for a benchmarked, professional audit. My AI Visibility Scorecard is a fixed £2,500 for a ten-working-day audit against three named competitors.
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Q.02
How long does a GEO audit take?
A basic self-audit takes an afternoon. A professional audit takes one to two weeks, because the benchmarking and competitor testing take time to do properly.
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Q.03
Can I do a GEO audit myself?
Yes, to a point. The four checks above give you a real read on where you stand. What a professional audit adds is the benchmarking, the consistent scoring, and the judgement to prioritise the fixes, which is the hard part.
Find out what to fix first
My AI Visibility Scorecard is exactly this, productised: three live AI-engine tests against three named competitors, an audit of your key pages across the five dimensions, and a prioritised list of what to fix first, delivered in ten working days for a fixed fee. To understand the discipline behind it, read what generative engine optimisation is and GEO vs SEO.
Book the AI Visibility Scorecard →