What a GEO website audit covers
Four layers, in order. Presence: which of your buying moments name you across the four major assistants. Accuracy: whether the facts assistants state about you are true. Sources: which citations power the answers in your category, and whether you are in them. Readiness: whether your site's content, structure and entity data have the properties that earn mentions. A real audit outputs evidence, answer screenshots and a ranked fix list, not a score alone.
How to conduct a GEO audit, step by step
One: write twenty prompts from your buyers' real questions, several phrasings each. Two: run them through ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, recording mentions, position, sentiment and every citation. Three: audit your own site against the readiness checklist below. Four: compare your citation presence against the sources the assistants actually used. Five: rank the gaps by revenue impact and cheapness of fix. A focused version takes one afternoon and reorders most teams' roadmaps.
The GEO audit checklist
Content: one page per high-value buying moment, direct answer in the opening lines, buyer phrasing in titles, follow-up questions covered. Structure: single H1s, question-phrased H2s, FAQ and Article schema matching visible text, real tables, visible dates. Entity: identical name, category, pricing and claims across site, directories, reviews and profiles. Authority: presence in the listicles, review platforms and communities assistants cite for your category; recent reviews; consistent press. Measurement: a fixed prompt set, re-run monthly, trends not snapshots.
GEO audit vs SEO audit: the difference
An SEO audit inspects rankings, crawlability, links and keywords against one index. A GEO audit inspects answers: whether four different assistants name you, what they claim about you, and which third-party sources drive it. The overlap is the technical foundation; the difference is that a GEO audit treats your presence across the rest of the web, citations, reviews, entity data, as first-class, because assistants weigh corroboration the way search engines weigh links.
GEO audit tools, free and paid
For readiness, the free Aethon GEO Grader scores your site across twenty checks in five minutes, no email required for the score. For presence, the free Aethon audit runs your top buyer questions through all four assistants and returns the screenshots and fix list within two business days. Paid platforms automate the monthly re-measurement; the honest ones, ours included, will tell you the audit is the start of the loop, not the product.
