Quick answer: A GEO audit answers four questions in order: Can AI engines reach your content (crawl audit)? Can they parse it (structure audit)? Do they trust and understand your brand (entity audit)? And do they actually cite you (visibility audit)? Run all four – a half-day manually, minutes with tooling – and you get a prioritised fix list instead of vague AI anxiety.
Stage 1: Crawl audit
Check robots.txt for AI-bot disallows (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended), review firewall/CDN rules for silent blocking, grep server logs for each bot’s visits and status codes (detection guide), and test whether content renders without JavaScript. Verify Bing indexation – Perplexity and ChatGPT search ride Bing. Failures here nullify everything downstream, and they are the most common failures we find.
Stage 2: Structure audit
For your ten most important pages: is the core question answered in the first paragraph? Are headings question-formatted? Is there at least one extractable table or list? Score fact density – concrete facts per hundred words (how). Validate schema: Organization, Article, FAQPage, Product as applicable. Each failure is a page-level fix with known cost.
Stage 3: Entity audit
Ask each engine “what is [your brand]?” and grade the answer: accurate, outdated, confused or blank. Check description consistency across site, LinkedIn, GBP, Crunchbase and directories (entity SEO). Inventory corroboration: reviews, press, community mentions. Blank or wrong entity answers explain most “AI ignores us” complaints.
Stage 4: Visibility audit
Build a panel of 20-50 buyer prompts (prompt research), run them across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Claude, and log: your presence, competitors present, and which URLs get cited. This is your baseline – repeat monthly. IndexGraph.ai automates all four stages, from crawler checks through prompt tracking, and its free report covers the essentials in minutes.
Turning findings into a plan
Sequence fixes by dependency: crawl blocks first (days), structure and schema second (weeks), entity and authority third (months, compounding). Re-run the visibility audit monthly – citation share moving is the only success metric that matters.
FAQ
How often should I audit?
Full audit quarterly; visibility panel monthly; crawl checks after any site change – a plugin update can silently reinstate bot blocks.
Want the audit done properly this week? Adexorb Technologies delivers all four stages with a prioritised 90-day fix plan.