What a GEO/AEO audit checks
An AI visibility audit answers one question: if a customer asks an AI assistant or a search engine for a business like yours, can they find your facts and trust them? This is the audit behind our AI search optimization service. You can buy it alone.
We start with your website. Then we improve your business one step at a time, and you choose every step. The audit is a first step with no commitment to a second.
The audit checklist, item by item
This is the AEO and GEO audit checklist we work through. Each item ends up in the report.
- Page map. We list the pages you have and the pages you should have: one per service, one per main area you serve, one per question customers ask often. Thin pages that repeat each other are flagged.
- Service page template. We draft a layout for your service pages: what is included, who it is for, where you work, price or “from” price, timeline, what you need to provide, and a short FAQ. A fixed layout makes facts easy to find for people and for software.
- Missing information. We read your pages the way a customer would and list what is not there: prices, hours, service area, insurance or licensing, how to book.
- Technical checks. Can crawlers reach the pages? We check robots.txt, the sitemap, status codes, and whether key text is in the page itself and not hidden behind a click or a chat window. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear in its AI features, with no extra technical requirements.
- Crawler access. OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot. We check these, plus Googlebot and Bingbot, and explain GPTBot (a training crawler) as a separate choice for you.
- Schema. We test your structured data for Organization, LocalBusiness or ProfessionalService and Service, and check any FAQ markup you already have. Google says structured data should match the visible text, so we compare the two. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026, so we do not count FAQ markup as a search feature. See schema markup for local business.
- Name, address and phone. We compare Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Yelp and your site, and list every difference, down to “Street” versus “St.” and an old phone number.
- Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow. We check that the site is verified and submitting changes through IndexNow. Bing’s AI Performance report shows citations in Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries, so a verified site gives you data later.
- llms.txt. Reviewed last, and marked optional. See llms.txt.
The AI-answer baseline and re-check
Before we change anything, we ask the main AI assistants the questions your customers ask, for example “who does emergency roof repair in Somerville” or “which med spa in Boston offers a consultation”. For each question we record the tool, the date, the answer, whether you are mentioned or cited, and who is mentioned instead.
AI answers vary from one run to the next, so one screenshot proves little. We use the same questions in the baseline and the re-check, note the differences, and describe them as what we saw on those dates.
After the fixes are live, we run the same questions again. Google counts traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode in the Search Console Performance report under the Web search type, and its 2026 guide also points to a Generative AI performance report in Search Console. We show you where to look in both.
What you receive
- A written audit report with a prioritized fix list.
- The page map and the service page template.
- The missing-information list, page by page.
- Schema and listing findings, with the exact corrections.
- The baseline and, after fixes, the re-check.
The report is yours to keep. You can hand it to your own web person, or ask us to make the fixes as a separate written scope.
Free audit tools versus a paid audit
Many free AI search audit tools and checklists exist. They are a fair starting point: they flag obvious technical problems quickly. They usually cannot tell you which pages your business should have, whether your schema matches the visible page, or whether your profiles disagree, and a score is not a plan. We would rather you start with a free tool than skip the check. If you want a person to read your site and give you a ranked list, that is what the audit is for.
What it costs and what is not included
The GEO/AEO audit is from $750 and takes 1-2 weeks. Prices are as of October 2026. If you want the fixes made, ongoing work is from $450/month, and local SEO is from $600/month; both are optional and quoted in writing first.
Not included: domain and hosting, new photography, third-party software subscriptions (billed at cost), SMS carrier registration (A2P 10DLC) and message fees, and AI usage above the plan allowance.
Who this is for, and who it is not for
It fits local service businesses with a website and some history that are asking why competitors appear and they do not. It is less useful if you have no site yet. In that case a new website or an AI-ready website comes first.
How to start
Ask for a free demo (30-minute call; demo shared within 3 business days). Or call 617-991-9912 (our AI assistant answers and passes your request to the team).
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