You spent years optimizing for Google's ten blue links. Today your most consequential visitor is often an AI agent deciding whether to read, trust, and recommend you. If ChatGPT crawls your site right now, can it reach your content, parse your pricing, and cite you in an answer? A traditional SEO audit will not tell you. A GEO audit will. This guide shows you how to run one, what to check, how to fix what you find, and how GEOly's 29-check GEO Audit scores your AI-readiness in minutes.
By the end you will have checked crawler access, structured data, and content readiness, and produced a prioritized fix list.
Key takeaways
- A GEO audit measures whether AI crawlers can access, parse, and cite your site, which is a different question from keyword rankings and backlinks. - The four things that most often block AI visibility are crawler access in `robots.txt`, missing or thin structured data, low semantic density, and content buried behind scripts. - Check for the real AI user agents by name, including `GPTBot`, `OAI-SearchBot`, `ClaudeBot`, `PerplexityBot`, and `Google-Extended`, and decide access deliberately rather than by accident. - An `llms.txt` file gives models a clean map to your most important content, complementing rather than replacing `robots.txt`. - GEOly runs a 29-check GEO Audit that scores site and page AI-readiness on a 0 to 100 / A to F scale, with a free 3-day trial at app.geoly.ai.
Step 1: Understand why an SEO audit is not enough
SEMrush and Ahrefs are excellent at backlinks and keywords, but AI models weigh different signals. They care whether your core content fits and reads cleanly in a context window, whether it is dense enough in verifiable facts to be worth citing, whether your crawler rules accidentally shut them out, and whether you expose the structured data that helps them identify your entity.
A GEO audit checks those signals directly. Think of it as asking, for every page, "if an AI read only this, would it understand what you sell, trust it, and be able to cite it?"
Gotcha: passing a Lighthouse or SEO audit does not mean you pass a GEO audit. A fast, well-ranked page can still block `GPTBot` or ship its content only after JavaScript runs.
Step 2: Audit AI crawler access in robots.txt
Start where visibility most often dies: `robots.txt`. Many sites unintentionally block the very agents that feed AI answers. Open `yourdomain.com/robots.txt` and look for the AI user agents by name.
The ones that matter include `GPTBot` and `OAI-SearchBot` (OpenAI), `ClaudeBot` (Anthropic), `PerplexityBot` (Perplexity), `Google-Extended` (Google's AI training control), and `CCBot` (Common Crawl, which feeds many models). A blanket `Disallow: /` under one of these, or a broad rule you forgot about, quietly removes you from those systems.
Decide access on purpose. If you want AI visibility, allow the search and answer crawlers. You may still choose to disallow training-only bots; that is a policy call, not a default. For the reasoning behind auditing this now, read [why brands should audit AI crawler access now](/blog/why-brands-audit-ai-crawler-access-now).
