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Free GEO Audit: A 90-Minute Quick Start, Then A Monthly Routine Inside Your Agent OS
A free GEO audit checks whether generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Microsoft Copilot can read your site, trust your content and cite it, and you can run your first one in about 90 minutes.
GEO stands for generative engine optimisation, a term introduced in a 2023 research paper that tested what makes content more visible in AI answers.
This quick start gives you ten checks, the first run step by step and the skill file I'd give an agent so your Agent OS repeats the audit every month.
If you want help, book a free strategy session and see why competitors appear more often in AI answers.
What a free GEO audit is
A free GEO audit checks whether generative AI engines can read your site, trust your content and cite it when they write an answer.
It runs at three levels, which are your site, your most important pages and your brand across the wider web.
A normal SEO audit asks whether Google can rank a page, while a GEO audit asks whether an AI will choose that page as a source.
Where the term GEO comes from
The term comes from a paper called "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization".
Its authors are Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande.
It was submitted to arXiv on 16 November 2023, and the listing notes it was accepted to KDD 2024.
| What the GEO paper tested | What it found |
|---|---|
| Nine ways of rewriting content across a 10,000-query benchmark called GEO-bench. | Cite Sources, Quotation Addition and Statistics Addition performed best. |
| A position-adjusted word count measure of visibility. | The best methods improved it by 30 to 40 percent in relative terms. |
| Keyword stuffing, the old SEO habit of repeating search terms. | It gave little to no improvement. |
| The same methods on Perplexity, a live generative engine. | It reported visibility improvements of up to 37 percent. |
The main experiments used a GPT-3.5-turbo engine, so I treat the findings as direction rather than a promise for today's engines.
Quick start: the ten free GEO audit checks
These are the checks I'd run, and the last column shows what each one rests on.
| # | Free GEO audit check | Level | Source behind it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI search crawlers are allowed in robots.txt and by your CDN. | Site | OpenAI, Perplexity and Google documentation. |
| 2 | Key pages are indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. | Site | Google's AI features guide. |
| 3 | Your pages already earn AI citations. | Site | Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance. |
| 4 | Each section answers a real question in its first sentence. | Page | Bing guidance and my own practice. |
| 5 | Numbers on the page name their sources. | Page | The GEO paper and Bing guidance. |
| 6 | Quotes are real and attributed. | Page | The GEO paper. |
| 7 | Important claims link to credible primary sources. | Page | The GEO paper. |
| 8 | The page has no keyword stuffing. | Page | The GEO paper. |
| 9 | Outside sites describe your brand the same way you do. | Brand | Goldie Agency's strategy session page. |
| 10 | Key facts are accurate and up to date. | Brand | Bing and Google guidance. |
Score each check 0 for missing, 1 for partly there and 2 for solid, which gives you a total out of 20.
OpenAI's documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
Perplexity's documentation recommends allowing PerplexityBot if you want to appear in its search results.
Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
Google also says crawling should be allowed by any CDN or hosting infrastructure, so robots.txt isn't the only thing to check.
📞 Want these checks run against your competitors too?
Book a free strategy session with Goldie Agency and leave with a custom visibility plan, a clear AI visibility roadmap and a competitor gap analysis.
🔥 Want the exact AI SEO setup I run inside my Agent OS?
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The first run, step by step
The first audit takes about 90 minutes by hand, and every later audit is faster.
- First, open your robots.txt file and confirm the AI search crawlers you want are allowed.
- Second, check your five most important pages in Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool to confirm they're indexed.
- Third, set up Bing Webmaster Tools and open the AI Performance report to see your current citations.
- Fourth, ask five real buyer prompts in Perplexity, ChatGPT and Google AI Mode and note which sources each answer cites.
- Fifth, run the page check prompt below on your five most important pages.
- Sixth, list twenty outside pages that mention your brand and compare them with your own facts.
- Seventh, check the dates and key facts on your top pages.
- Eighth, score all ten checks and pick the lowest site-level score to fix first.
This is the page check prompt for the fifth step.
Read the page text below and act as a strict editor. Quote the first sentence of each section and say whether it directly answers a question. List every number and whether a source is named for it. List every quotation and whether the speaker or source is named. List every outbound citation and what kind of source it points to. List any phrase repeated in a way a normal writer wouldn't repeat it. Do not rewrite the page and do not invent sources.
How a free GEO audit fits an Agent OS workflow
My Agent OS runs a crew of AI agents under one shared memory, which is what turns a one-off audit into a monthly routine.
Most of the checks are repetitive reading jobs, and that's exactly the work agents handle well.
| GEO audit job | What an agent in your Agent OS does | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Crawl check | An agent reads robots.txt every month and flags any AI search crawler that is blocked. | You sign off any change to the live site. |
| Citation log | An agent stores Bing AI Performance exports and prompt-test sources in shared memory with the date. | You choose the buyer prompts to test. |
| Page review | An agent runs the page check prompt on your top pages and lists missing sources, quotes and data. | You add the real numbers and quotes only you have. |
| Consensus check | An agent compares outside pages that mention you with your brand fact file. | You contact the sites that need updating. |
| Freshness check | An agent flags pages with old dates, old prices or old team details. | You confirm the correct facts. |
| Monthly scorecard | An agent scores all ten checks and compares them with last month. | You decide which fix happens first. |
The shared memory matters because every scorecard, citation export and outside mention lands in one place.
That lets an agent tell you what changed since last month instead of starting from scratch every time.
🔥 Want the exact AI SEO setup I run inside my Agent OS?
Inside the AI Profit Boardroom you get the installable Agent OS, step-by-step video tutorials, four coaching calls a week and 3,400+ members building real automations.
The skill file I'd hand the agent
In my own setup, agents follow written skill files, which are recipes that set the steps, the rules and the things they must never do.
This is the GEO audit recipe I'd write.
FREE GEO AUDIT SKILL (monthly) 1. Load the brand fact file, the top five page URLs and last month's scorecard from shared memory. 2. Read robots.txt and report OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot as allowed or blocked. 3. Load the latest Bing AI Performance export and list cited pages and grounding queries. 4. For each top page, list section first sentences, statistics and their sources, quotes and their speakers, outbound sources and repeated phrases. 5. Compare the stored outside mentions with the fact file and mark each as matching, conflicting or missing. 6. Flag any visible date, price or team detail older than the review period. 7. Score each of the ten checks 0, 1 or 2, with one line of evidence per score. 8. Compare the total with last month and list the three biggest changes. NEVER: invent sources, invent quotes, rewrite live pages without approval, or promise citations.
The NEVER line matters most, because an agent that invents a source or a quote would undermine the exact trust signals the audit is meant to build.
The free sources behind the audit
Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance shows total citations, average cited pages, grounding queries and page-level citation activity across Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and select partners.
Microsoft calls it an early step toward GEO tooling, and it added a Topics Portfolio beta on 13 October 2026 that lists queries where other sites appear and yours doesn't.
Bing's own guidance says examples, data and cited sources help build trust when content is reused in AI-generated answers.
It also says accurate and up-to-date content is important for inclusion and citation in AI-generated answers.
Google Search Console is free, and Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic is counted inside its "Web" search type.📞 Low score on brand consensus?
Grab a free strategy session and get a strategy built around your brand, covering the bylines, reviews, comparisons, research and authority placements that fit your market.
What to fix first
Fix crawl access and indexing first, because the engines' makers spell those out in their own documentation.
Fix the page-level checks next on your most valuable page, starting with sourced statistics and citations to credible sources.
Then spend real time on brand consensus, because that's usually where competitors win.
Goldie Agency's strategy session page says AI platforms don't recommend brands simply because they publish more on their own websites.
It says trusted publications, expert articles, independent reviews, comparisons and credible third-party references help create a clear consensus around who you are.
What the free strategy session is, and what it isn't
The free strategy session with Goldie Agency works like a free GEO audit conversation, and the page says it's 100% free with no obligation.
You talk to an experienced strategist and leave with a custom visibility plan, a clear AI visibility roadmap, a competitor gap analysis and a plan for traffic, mentions and leads.
It isn't a written report or an automated audit tool, so run your own scorecard first and bring it along.
The limits of a free GEO audit
A free GEO audit tells you what to improve, but it can't tell you exactly how an engine will weigh each change.
Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode, so nobody needs a secret GEO file.
Nobody can guarantee what a generative engine will cite, and that includes me and my agency.
Where to go next on agentos.guide
My free AEO report guide shows how to measure what AI tools say about you once these fixes are live.
My free SEO and GEO audit guide puts classic SEO checks next to GEO checks.
My AI SEO optimization agency guide covers what happens if you'd rather hire the work out.
Also On Our Network
FAQ
What is a free GEO audit?
It is a check of whether generative AI engines can read your site, trust your content and cite it. It covers crawl access, indexing, current citations, citation-worthy answers, sourced statistics, quotations, citations, keyword stuffing, brand consensus and freshness.
Where does the term GEO come from?
It comes from the paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande, submitted to arXiv in November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024.
What worked best in the GEO paper?
Citing credible sources, adding quotations and adding statistics performed best, with a 30 to 40 percent relative improvement on the paper's main visibility measure. Keyword stuffing gave little to no improvement.
Can an Agent OS run a GEO audit automatically?
Agents can read robots.txt, store citation exports, review pages, compare outside mentions with your fact file and score the checks each month. You still choose the prompts, supply real data and quotes and approve any changes.
Is the free strategy session a free GEO audit?
It works like a free GEO audit conversation. Goldie Agency's free strategy session gives you a custom visibility plan, an AI visibility roadmap and a competitor gap analysis, but it is a live call rather than a written report.
Does a GEO audit guarantee AI citations?
No. It shows what to improve, and nobody can guarantee what a generative engine will cite.
Final word on the free GEO audit
Run the ten checks once by hand, hand the skill file to an agent and compare your scorecard every month.
When you want a strategist's view, book a free strategy session and leave with a plan for traffic, mentions and leads.
That's how a free GEO audit becomes a habit instead of a one-off.
About Julian
I'm Julian Goldie, an AI entrepreneur, SEO expert and the founder of the AI Profit Boardroom, which has 3,400+ members.
I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation and SEO.
My YouTube channel has 400,000+ subscribers, and I run Goldie Agency, a seven-figure SEO agency.
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