GEO Audit: How to Audit a Page for AI Citation Readiness
A GEO audit is a structured check of whether a page is prepared to be retrieved, understood and cited by AI answer engines. Where an SEO audit asks 'can this rank', a GEO audit asks 'can this be quoted'; they share a foundation but diverge on the content layer.
A useful GEO audit produces a score you can act on: a ranked list of what is blocking citation and the specific fix for each, not a vague grade.
What a GEO audit checks
The checks fall into two halves — the page, and the brand behind it:
- Retrievability: AI-crawler access, indexability and whether content survives without JavaScript.
- Structured data: Organization, Article and FAQPage schema, and whether it is server-rendered or injected.
- Extractable formatting: direct-answer openings, lists, tables and heading hierarchy.
- Entity authority: Wikipedia and Wikidata presence, sameAs depth and Organization completeness.
How the score is built
In Maveriko, a GEO score is 60% page readiness and 40% entity authority, because for recommendation questions engines name brands, not URLs. Each check cites the authority its rule comes from, and the full weighting is on the methodology page. A blocked or non-indexable page is capped, because no amount of good schema helps a page an engine cannot read.
Running one
You can run a free GEO audit on any URL from the Maveriko homepage — paste a link and you get the SEO, GEO and entity scores with the exact fixes. Re-run after changes to verify what moved; that find-fix-verify loop is the point of auditing at all.
What a GEO audit finds that an SEO audit misses
A conventional SEO audit and a GEO audit overlap on maybe half their checks, and the half they do not share is where most sites are losing ground. SEO tooling was built when the goal was a ranking, so it grades what earns a ranking: titles, meta descriptions, internal links, Core Web Vitals, crawl budget — the ground a free SEO audit tool covers.
GEO grades what earns a quotation, and several of those signals are invisible to traditional tooling. Whether GPTBot is allowed. Whether the page renders server-side for a crawler that does not run JavaScript. Whether each section answers its own heading in the first sentence. Whether the brand resolves to a real entity that a model already knows.
The practical consequence is that a page can pass a full technical SEO audit with no errors and still be structurally impossible to cite. That is the most common result we see, and it is why the two audits are not substitutes.
| Signal | SEO audit | GEO audit |
|---|---|---|
| Title and meta | Core check | Minor |
| Crawlability (Googlebot) | Core check | Assumed |
| AI crawler access | Not checked | Pass/fail gate |
| Server-rendered content | Soft warning | Pass/fail gate |
| JSON-LD depth | Rich-result eligibility | Primary extraction source |
| Direct-answer openings | Not checked | Core check |
| Entity authority | Not checked | 40% of the score |
Frequently asked questions
How long does a GEO audit take?+
A single-page GEO audit is a matter of seconds — the checks read your HTML, robots.txt and public entity records, none of which require crawling your whole site. A full-site GEO review takes longer because it has to sample enough pages to find patterns, but the per-page work is fast.
What score should I be aiming for?+
Treat 70 as the floor for a page you actually want cited and 85 as competitive. The number matters less than which half is weak: a page scoring 60 because it is unquotable needs completely different work from one scoring 60 because nobody has heard of the brand.
Do I need to audit every page?+
No. Audit your homepage, your highest-intent commercial pages and one representative page from each template. Most GEO faults are template-level — a rendering choice or a schema block repeated across hundreds of URLs — so fixing the template fixes the site.
Sources
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