GEO Audit
A GEO audit measures whether generative engines can access your pages, lift your passages, and attribute your claims. Essel scores it deterministically against your real site — GEO, AEO, and AI-crawler access are about a quarter of your total score — with a fix for every finding. Free for any page, no sign-up.
Three steps, measured at each one.
Paste any page
The free scan scores GEO, AEO, and AI-discoverability for one URL — every finding and fix visible.
Read the GEO verdict
Passage citability, answer structure, citable evidence, crawler access — measured, not vibes.
Go site-wide for $10
Citability coverage across the crawl, site-wide crawler gating, and generated llms.txt + JSON-LD.
Coverage
Built on the measured levers — passage structure, citable evidence, attributable identity — not the folklore. The report is honest about what doesn't move the needle, including llms.txt.
Passage citability
whether your sections sit in the word window a generative engine can quote whole
Citable evidence
quantified claims — percentages, figures, dates — a model will attribute to you
Publisher identity
Organization and Person schema plus a named author, the attributable identity engines cite
Heading outline
the clean hierarchy a model uses to map your document
Site-level citability
what share of your whole site carries question headings, lists, and tables — measured across the crawl
Question-shaped headings
headings phrased as the questions people actually type
Answer-first openings
direct answers sized for lifting, with preamble and hedging openers flagged
Extractable structure
lists and tables — the shapes answer engines quote verbatim
FAQ & QA schema
FAQPage and QAPage markup, scored honestly as opportunity, not as a retired rich-result win
AI crawler access
17+ AI crawlers checked against your robots.txt and your edge's actual behavior
Server-rendered content
generative engines read HTML, not your JavaScript bundle
Snippet eligibility
directives that silently exclude you from AI Overviews
Freshness signals
machine-readable dates, scored by age, not mere presence
Here's what a real report looks like.
Your shape
Strong technical foundations, thin where AI engines look.
Your scores
Search engines can crawl and index it
AI engines can find, read, and cite it
Clear, complete, well-structured
How fast it loads and responds
Web presence and links
What AI thinks of you
Ask an AI assistant about your site and it says:
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Search foundations vs AI readiness
11 categories · renormalized 0–100Page speed
Perf –Authority & web presence
Fix these first
Highest-impact, with the exact stepsAlso in your report
A report tells you what's broken. Essel also writes what's missing.
The same engine behind this audit researches, writes, and publishes GEO-optimized articles for your site — on a cadence, autonomously.
The comparison
GEO consulting is young and methodologies vary wildly. A deterministic audit gives you the same checks, the same weights, and a re-run button.
Essel site audit
in the whole-site audit · free for one page
GEO consulting
per engagement · methodology varies
GEO, AEO, and AI-discoverability carry 37 of 142 possible points in Essel's scoring model — roughly 26% of the total, reflecting where discovery is actually shifting.
FAQ
The questions people ask before optimizing for generative engines.
A GEO audit measures whether generative engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — can access, understand, and cite your site when composing answers. It checks the access layer (AI-crawler permissions, server-rendered content), the structure layer (passages sized for quoting, question headings, direct answers), and the evidence layer (quantified claims and an attributable identity worth citing). Essel scores all of it per page and across your site, with a fix for every gap.
SEO optimizes for ranked lists of links; GEO optimizes for being quoted inside a composed answer. The foundations overlap — crawlability, structure, authority — but GEO adds requirements classic SEO never tested: passages an engine can lift whole, claims specific enough to attribute, an identity to attribute them to, and access rules for AI crawlers that robots.txt files written in 2015 silently block. Essel's audit scores both in one report; the AI-native categories carry roughly a quarter of the total.
The measured levers are structural: sections sized so an engine can quote them, answer-first openings under question-shaped headings, quantified claims with a named author and organization behind them. The commonly oversold levers are llms.txt and schema markup on their own — publishing either without fixing structure moves little, which is why Essel's audit weights llms.txt near zero and says so in the report. An honest audit tells you where the weight actually is.
Answer-engine optimization is its own scored category in the audit, separate from GEO. AEO asks a narrower question: when someone types a question your page answers, can an answer engine lift the answer directly? The audit checks question-shaped headings, answer-first paragraph structure, extractable lists and tables, and FAQ markup — and flags hedging openers that bury the answer a paragraph deep.
The single-page GEO audit is free: paste a URL and the scan scores GEO, AEO, and AI-discoverability for that page with every finding and fix visible, no sign-up. The $10 whole-site audit runs the same checks across up to 100 crawled pages and adds the site-level view — citability coverage, site-wide crawler gating, and generated artifacts like llms.txt and JSON-LD blocks.
Paste a URL and get the generative-engine verdict for that page free — citability, answer structure, crawler access, and every fix. Whole site, $10.