GEO audit checklist: what to check so AI assistants can read and recommend you

What a GEO audit checks

A GEO audit asks four questions, in this order:

1. Can the assistants reach you? Crawlers are allowed and your pages are indexed.
2. Can they read you? Your facts are in plain text, one page per service.
3. Do other sources agree? Your profiles and listings match your site.
4. Do they name you? You test real questions and log the answers.

Customers already ask. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults found 45% had used ChatGPT or other generative AI tools for local recommendations, up from 6% the year before. This checklist is a do-it-yourself companion to our how customers see you check, which looks at your website, listings and AI answers from the outside. The test-question method is in Does ChatGPT recommend your business?.

One honest limit before you start. Nobody controls what ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode or Perplexity recommend. An audit can make your facts easy to read and record a before and after. It cannot buy you a place in an answer.

How to score it

Give each check one of three marks: Pass, Partial or Fail. Write the evidence next to it, for example a URL or a screenshot date. Use a spreadsheet with columns for check, mark, evidence, fix and date. Allow about two hours.

Part 1: Access (can they reach you?)

1. Your robots.txt does not block search crawlers. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Google says to make sure crawling is allowed in robots.txt, including any CDN or hosting layer in front of the site.

2. OAI-SearchBot is allowed. OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot is for search and that sites opted out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, although they can still appear as navigational links. OpenAI also says a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to take effect for search.

3. You know your GPTBot choice. OpenAI says GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train its models, and that disallowing it signals you do not want that. Blocking it does not remove you from ChatGPT search. This is a business decision, so make it on purpose.

4. ChatGPT-User is understood. OpenAI says ChatGPT-User handles actions started by a person and that robots.txt rules may not apply to it. Do not try to manage it with robots.txt.

5. Google-Extended is understood. Google says it governs AI training and grounding in some of its other systems and is not part of Search. Blocking it does not remove you from AI Overviews.

6. The site does not hide behind a login, a pop-up or a script. Open your key pages with JavaScript off, or view the page source. If prices and hours are missing, a crawler may miss them too.

7. Your pages are indexed. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet to be a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that there are no additional technical requirements. Search site:yourdomain.com and check Search Console’s page indexing report for your service pages.

8. Bing can see you. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools. IndexNow lets you tell participating engines, including Bing, Yandex and Naver, when a page changes. IndexNow’s page does not mention Google. OpenAI does not confirm that consumer ChatGPT search uses Bing, so treat Bing as useful on its own and not as a ChatGPT switch. The Apple Business, Bing Places and Yelp guide covers what is documented.

Part 2: Content (can they read you?)

9. One page per service, with the answer first. Each main service has its own page that says what it is, who it is for, where you work, what it costs or what the price depends on, and how to start, in the first lines.

10. Important content is in text. Google recommends making sure important content is available in textual form. Prices in an image or a PDF only are Partial at best.

11. Facts are specific. Replace “affordable, fast, reliable” with hours, areas, response time you can keep, licenses and what is included. Numbers beat adjectives, for people and for machines.

12. Name, address or service area, phone and hours are in the page text. Put them on the contact page and in the footer in plain text. Compare them with your profiles using the NAP consistency method.

13. No contradictions. Hours, services and areas agree on every page. Old pages that list a former price or phone are the usual culprits.

14. Reviews and credentials are visible. Real reviews, licenses, insurance and years in business, if true, appear on the page where a customer decides.

15. The FAQ answers real questions. Use questions customers ask on calls. Answers of one to three sentences work best. Write them for readers, not for a search feature.

Part 3: Structured data (do the facts match the code?)

16. LocalBusiness markup matches the visible page. Google’s documentation lists name and address as required and telephone, opening hours, URL and coordinates as recommended, and says it does not guarantee that features using structured data will show up. Google’s generative AI guide also says structured data is not required for AI features and no special schema.org markup is needed. Treat markup as a way to repeat true facts, and run it through a validator. Failing this check matters less than failing 1 to 14.

17. llms.txt: optional. Google says you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or Markdown to appear in Google Search, and that Google Search does not use them. Add one if you like, but score it last.

Part 4: Profiles and listings (do other sources agree?)

18. Google Business Profile is verified and complete. Google says Business Profiles can help your products and services be visible in AI responses and other search results. Work through the Google Business Profile checklist. Service-area businesses should hide their address.

19. Apple, Bing and Yelp match Google. Same name, phone, hours and area on each. Whitespark’s 2026 survey of local experts added an AI visibility score and found that three of its top five AI factors relate to citations. That is expert opinion, not a platform statement, but it is a cheap thing to fix. For what Apple and Amazon document about Siri and Alexa+, see voice search, Siri and Alexa+.

20. Reviews are recent and answered. Check the count, the newest date and whether replies are specific. See do reviews affect AI recommendations.

Part 5: Answers and measurement (do they name you?)

21. Run the baseline. Ask the “find me” questions in ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity, three runs each, and log the result. The method is in the 30-minute self-test. A SparkToro study reported by Search Engine Journal ran 2,961 prompts, repeating each 60 to 100 times, and found ChatGPT and Google’s AI features gave the same brand list less than 1% of the time. Visibility across many runs was steadier than position. So record how often you are named, not where, and read the rank-tracking claims with that in mind. The study was partly sponsored by an AI tracking vendor and is not peer reviewed.

22. Check what Search Console now reports. Google says its generative AI performance report was rolled out to all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026. It shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, date or device. Clicks from AI features also appear in the normal Performance report under the Web search type. For traffic from ChatGPT and other assistants, see ChatGPT and AI traffic in GA4.

The scorecard

What to fix first

1. Any Fail in Access.
2. Wrong facts in an AI answer, fixed at the source it cited. Our guide to AI recommending competitors, not you explains how to trace it.
3. Missing service pages and facts in text.
4. Profile mismatches.
5. Markup and llms.txt.

Do you need a tool or a person?

A tool earns its fee when you need tracking across dozens of prompts every month. AI visibility tools compared lists what each does and costs. A chat assistant can suggest wording for a page you give it, but cannot see your Search Console or server logs, so it cannot run the audit.

If you want an outside view, a free demo shows how customers and AI assistants see your business today, with one positioning idea and 3-4 competitors side by side. It is free, with no obligation. What Magnet Mint promises is structure, facts and a measured before and after, never placement in an AI answer.

Published October 26, 2026. Updated October 26, 2026.