Before you start making changes and creating new content, it’s important to audit where you currently stand. This GEO-focused audit will reveal strengths to build on and gaps to address. We will examine your content, technical setup, and brand signals through the eyes of generative AI: Can AI find your content easily? Does it understand who you are (your Entity)? Is your content format AI-friendly? What is being said about you across the web? By performing this audit, you’ll have a clear baseline and a roadmap of priorities.
First, ensure that your site’s technical foundation is solid, because if AI engines can’t access or parse your content, nothing else matters. Much of this overlaps with a standard SEO audit, but with a few AI-specific considerations:
- Crawlability for AI Crawlers: Confirm that you’re not inadvertently blocking the bots that feed AI models. Check your robots.txt and meta tags for rules related to AI. For example, OpenAI introduced GPTBot; if you had disallowed it, ChatGPT might not ingest your site’s content in future updates. Unless you have privacy concerns, you likely want to allow GPTBot to crawl. Similarly, Google offers a Google-Extended token for opting out of content being used in AI training while remaining in search. You should decide your stance: opting out might protect your content from being used to train models like Bard, but opting in means Google’s AI will learn from your site (which could make it more likely to include your info in answers). Many publishers currently allow it to preserve visibility. Ensure that any such directives align with your GEO goals.
- Indexing Status: Verify that all important content is indexed in Google and Bing. Use Google Search Console’s Index Coverage reports and Bing’s Index Status. If some pages (especially high-value informational pages or guides) are not indexed, fix that (submit sitemaps, remove noindex tags, or improve content quality to get indexed). Generative engines largely pull from indexed content. Also make sure your pages have descriptive title tags – while AI might not display your title, these help search engines understand the context of the page for retrieval.
- Structured Data Presence: Check your usage of schema markup (Structured Data). This is key for both SEO and GEO. Schema helps search algorithms interpret the content, which can influence AI selection. At minimum, ensure you have Organization or Website schema on your site (defining your business or brand), Article or BlogPosting schema on content pages, and FAQ or HowTo schema where applicable. Google’s AI Overviews can sometimes draw directly from FAQ schema – for instance, it might use a Q&A pair from your FAQ markup to answer a user’s follow-up question. Having that on-page not only helps classic rich results, but also feeds the AI with well-structured Q&A content. Perform a schema audit using Google’s Rich Results Test or Bing’s Markup Validator.
- Content Format and Parsing: Ensure your HTML is clean and well-structured. AI models prefer text they can easily parse. Content hidden behind heavy client-side scripts might be missed by search indexers (and thus by AI). If you have content in PDFs or images, consider providing text alternatives (for example, if you published a whitepaper PDF, summarize it in an HTML page as well so the AI can “read” it). Also, check your pages for logical heading structure (H1, H2, H3…), as this hierarchy can guide both search snippet extraction and AI content understanding. A quick way is to use an SEO crawler like Screaming Frog to see the heading outline of key pages.
- Site Performance: Fast sites not only rank better but also might be favored by AI retrieval systems (to quickly fetch info). Make sure your site loads quickly and is mobile-optimized. If an AI like Google’s needs to fetch your page on the fly for an answer (in some cases SGE might use real-time content fetch), a slow response could mean your info doesn’t get used due to timeouts. Use PageSpeed Insights to identify performance issues.
- Opt-in to Beta Programs: If you have the opportunity, enroll in any relevant beta programs (for example, if Google invites sites to pilot some AI content feedback program, or if Microsoft offers an index API specifically for Bing AI). Being part of these can give insight into how your content is used. While auditing, note any such opportunities (they may be communicated via Search Console messages or industry forums).
By completing the technical audit, you ensure there are no barriers for AI engines to find and utilize your content. Next, we’ll assess your content itself and how it appears to AI-driven systems.