Most of what a GEO audit checks, you can verify yourself in under an hour, for free. Do it before you buy anything. You will learn what you actually need, and you will be able to tell within one conversation whether the person quoting you knows the subject.
No tools required beyond a browser.
Access — can AI systems read you at all
1. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Look for Disallow rules that apply to *, and for named AI bots: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended. If any are blocked, nothing downstream matters. Full crawler reference here.
2. Check the file your domain serves, not the one in your repository. A CDN or security layer can rewrite it. We nearly did this to ourselves.
3. Disable JavaScript in your browser and reload your key pages. If the content vanishes, some crawlers see an empty page.
4. View source on your homepage and search for noindex. It ends up in production more often than anyone admits.
Machine-readable facts
5. Paste your homepage URL into a structured data validator. You are looking for an Organization node with name, URL and contact details. Errors here mean the markup exists but is not being read.
6. Check whether your structured data names a person. An author that points at the company rather than a human is the cheapest trust signal left on the table. Why it matters.
7. Look for sameAs. If your markup does not list your external profiles, machines have no way to connect them to you. Entity building explained.
8. Open yourdomain.com/llms.txt. Optional, but its absence tells you nobody has done the AI-specific layer. What it is.
Content shape
9. Pick your most important page and find one paragraph that answers a customer question completely, on its own. If every paragraph needs the ones around it for context, there is nothing an assistant can lift. How to fix that.
10. Search your own site for your prices, timelines and specifics. If the concrete facts a buyer needs are not written down as facts, an AI cannot repeat them.
Reality check
11. Ask three assistants directly. "What do you know about [your brand]?" and "Who are the best [your category] providers in [your market]?" Note whether you appear, whether the details are right, and who appears instead. This takes five minutes and is the single most informative check on the list.
12. Search your brand name and see what exists besides your own site. One result means an unverified claim. Several consistent ones mean a confirmed entity.
Reading your results
If checks 1–4 fail, you have an access problem. It is the cheapest thing to fix and the most damaging to leave.
If 1–4 pass and 5–8 fail, you have a legibility problem. Machines can reach you but cannot parse what you are.
If those pass and 11–12 are weak, you have an authority problem — the slow one. No technical work shortcuts it.
Three questions for any vendor
Once you know your own numbers, these separate method from theatre:
"Which of these twelve did you check, and what did you find?" A real audit covers all of them and shows evidence.
"What does the price include beyond the list of problems?" A diagnosis without a fix list is half a product.
"What happens if it does not work?" Anyone guaranteeing citations is promising something they do not control.
If a vendor's findings match what you found yourself, and they explain the parts you could not check, they are worth paying. If their report is vaguer than your own hour of work, you already know more than they do.
Want to know how AI assistants see your website? Run the free check — we reply with a summary of what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini currently say about your business.
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