GEO Audit Checklist: 25 Checks Before You Ask AI to Recommend You
Whether an AI engine can find, understand, trust and quote your business – scored one point per “yes”.
A GEO audit checks whether an AI engine can find, understand, trust and quote your business. Score one point per “yes” below; under 12 means AI engines are probably not mentioning you at all.
A word on how to use this. We run this exact list, in this order, at the start of every GEO engagement – it’s deliberately a checklist, because vague audits produce vague fixes. Work through it with your own site open in another tab and count honestly; nobody is grading you but the machines.
A. Entity (5 checks)
- Same business name on your site, Google Business Profile and social profiles.
- One phone number and one email on every page.
- Founding year and founder named on the About page.
- Organization or LocalBusiness schema present.
- Social profile URLs in the schema sameAs property.
B. Structured data (5 checks)
- Service schema on each service page.
- FAQ schema where FAQs exist.
- BreadcrumbList markup.
- Offer or price data wherever prices are public.
- No schema errors in Google’s Rich Results Test.
C. Content extractability (6 checks)
- The first two sentences answer the page’s question.
- Clear H2/H3 structure.
- Tables for comparisons.
- Starting prices published.
- Dedicated pages for “vs”, “pricing” and “for {industry}” queries.
- Last-updated dates.
D. Citations and reputation (5 checks)
- Google Business Profile complete with services.
- At least one review-platform profile.
- Industry directory listings.
- Founder and team on LinkedIn with a company link.
- Mentions on partner or event pages (for example, workshop listings).
E. Technical and measurement (4 checks)
- XML sitemap submitted.
- No stray noindex; AI crawlers not blocked.
- Core Web Vitals pass.
- A monthly AI-visibility scan is recorded.
Scoring and what to fix first
Your score tells you where to start, and the order matters. Under 12? Begin with sections A and B – identity and schema – which is about one week of focused work, and skip everything else until it’s done. Scoring 12–18 usually means the foundation exists but the content doesn’t: section C, building the missing page types, is where your effort goes. At 19–25 you’re chasing the last mile – citations and measurement, sections D and E.
We run this audit as step one of the GEO service; the automated version is the free scan at apexintent.ai. When we first scored our own site against it, the result was humbling – which is rather the point of a checklist.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I re-audit?
Quarterly, plus after any site redesign.
Can I run this on a competitor?
Yes – sections A to C are visible on any public website.
What tool checks schema?
Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator.
Is this checklist enough to get cited?
It removes the blockers; content quality and real citations decide the rest.
Related: What is GEO? · How to optimise for ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews
