Your first GEO audit
An audit answers four questions. How visible are we? Who gets cited? Where are the gaps? What is AI already sending us?
What an audit answers
GEO should not be judged by feel. An audit answers five questions before any content is written. How visible are we? Who gets cited? Is what the engine says about us true? Where are the gaps against competitors? What is AI already sending us? The output is not a score to admire but a ranked list of questions to work on.
| Area | Core question |
|---|---|
| Visibility | Does AI mention our brand, and on which engines? |
| Citation | Is our website cited as evidence, or someone else’s? |
| Accuracy | Does AI describe our products correctly? |
| Competitive gap | Which questions name competitors but leave us out? |
| Opportunity | Which questions does no brand own strongly yet? |
Visibility
Measure the share of prompts in which your brand is mentioned: answers that include the brand divided by relevant answers measured. Then split it, because the average hides everything useful. Split by platform: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews rarely agree. Split by topic: a brand can be strong on battery life and invisible on pet hair. Split by funnel stage: being named in exploration answers and absent from decision answers is a specific, fixable problem.
Compare the result with your competitors and with the category leader, prompt by prompt. “We are at 42%” means little. “HomeMate is named on 9 of the 24 questions where we are not, all of them comparison questions” is a plan.
Citations
A brand being mentioned does not mean its content was cited. The engine can say “LumiHome is a good choice for small apartments” while quoting a review site, a forum thread or a competitor’s comparison page as the evidence. Measure mentions and citations separately, and list the domains engines cite when they answer your prompts. The balance between brand sites, publishers and communities differs widely from one industry to the next.
| Cited often | Cited rarely | |
|---|---|---|
| Mentioned often | Stronghold: defend it | Visible but not cited: your pages lack authority |
| Mentioned rarely | Cited but not visible: content is useful, brand link is weak | Opportunity: build both content and external authority |
Accuracy
Read what the engine actually says. Extract the factual statements: specifications, prices, compatibility, policies, what a product is for. Check each one against your verified facts and mark it correct, outdated, incorrect or unverified. Then trace every wrong statement to the page that taught it, because that page, not the engine, is where the fix goes. A water tank listed as 1.0 L when the current model holds 1.5 L usually comes from your own older spec sheet, still online, still indexed.
Opportunities
The most valuable output of an audit is a list of questions like these: questions where competitors appear and you do not; questions where the information about your product is wrong; questions where AI quotes an old price or a retired product; questions where only one publisher or community is cited again and again; questions no brand has clearly claimed. Each one becomes a task with a reason and an owner.
AI traffic
Review referrals from AI platforms and the pages they land on. Much AI-driven traffic arrives without a clear referrer, so estimate the lift as well as counting clicks: compare branded search volume, direct visits and enquiries in the weeks after a mention appears. The visit is the last step of a decision that was made inside the answer.