Most GEO guides — including our own pillar article — are built around a framework: technical, content, and external signals. That is the right mental model, but it does not tell you what to actually go click on today. This is the checklist version: 15 concrete things to check on your own site, in about an hour, with nothing more than a browser and an AI assistant open in another tab.
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We run this exact checklist against our own site and our own app listings before every launch. It is not glamorous work, but it is the difference between an AI assistant finding a clear answer on your page and moving on to a competitor’s.
— Mateusz Maslon, SEO/GEO Specialist 🎯
LinkedIn ↗
How to Use This Checklist
Go through the three sections in order. Nothing here requires a paid tool — your own browser, your site, and a free ChatGPT or Perplexity account are enough. Keep a rough tally as you go; the scoring guide at the end tells you what to do with it.
Pillar 1: Technical
5 Technical Checks
Your robots.txt allows AI crawlers — open yoursite.com/robots.txt and confirm you are not accidentally blocking GPTBot, PerplexityBot, or similar.
An llms.txt file exists — check yoursite.com/llms.txt. If it 404s, this is a same-day fix on most modern SEO plugins.
Core Web Vitals pass — run your homepage and one deep page through PageSpeed Insights. A slow, unstable page gets crawled less thoroughly.
Structured data validates — run your key pages through Google’s Rich Results Test or Schema.org validator and fix any errors, not just warnings.
The site is genuinely mobile-friendly — load your own site on a phone and see if anything is cut off, overlapping, or slow to interact with.
Pillar 2: Content
5 Content Checks
The first two sentences answer the question — open your top 3 pages and check whether the actual answer appears before any throat-clearing intro.
Each page has one clear topic — a page trying to rank for ten different questions usually ends up a confident source for none of them.
Headings work as standalone answers — “Features” tells a model nothing; “Does It Work Offline?” gives it something to match directly to a query.
Claims are backed by real specifics — scan for vague marketing language (“industry-leading,” “best-in-class”) and replace it with numbers or named details.
Freshness is visible — check whether your key pages show an updated date, and whether that date is actually recent.
Pillar 3: External
5 External Checks
Test yourself in an AI assistant — ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview the exact questions your customers ask, and see if you show up at all.
Real backlinks and mentions exist — a quick search for your brand name plus “review” or “vs” shows whether anyone besides you is talking about it.
Reviews are visible and current — Google Business Profile, Trustpilot, app store reviews — wherever applicable, check they are recent and reasonably positive.
Your brand name is consistent everywhere — the same spelling and description across your site, social profiles, and any directories — inconsistency makes it harder for an AI system to confirm who you are.
A Google Knowledge Panel or Business Profile is accurate — if one exists for your brand, check the address, hours, and description actually match reality.
Scoring Yourself
12–15 checked: You are in solid shape — the remaining gains are usually incremental, not foundational.
7–11 checked: There are real, fixable gaps. Most of these take an afternoon each, not a rebuild.
Under 7 checked: Start with the technical section first — content and external signals do not matter much if AI crawlers cannot read the site cleanly.
The Same Checklist, Applied Beyond the Website
These same three pillars apply to more than a website. We recently walked through what this looks like for an app store listing in Will ChatGPT Recommend Your App? — and for a deeper dive on the content-level checks specifically, see How to Get Cited by AI Assistants.
If This Turned Up More Than a Few Gaps
That is exactly what our SEO & GEO service exists to fix — a full audit against all three pillars, followed by a prioritized plan instead of a checklist you have to execute alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I run a GEO audit like this?
Quarterly is a reasonable default for most sites, or immediately after a major redesign, a new content push, or a migration that could affect crawlability.
Do I need paid tools to complete this checklist?
No — every check here can be done with a browser, your own site, free tools like Google’s Rich Results Test and PageSpeed Insights, and a free ChatGPT or Perplexity account.
What’s the single fastest fix on this list?
Checking and fixing your robots.txt and adding an llms.txt file are usually same-day fixes with an immediate, measurable effect on AI crawler access.
Is this checklist only for GEO, or does it help traditional SEO too?
Both. All 15 checks here are grounded in fundamentals that have always mattered for search — GEO just raises the bar on how well they need to be executed.
What if I score well on all 15 but still don’t show up in AI answers?
That usually points to a competitive or authority gap rather than a technical one — it may take time to build the external signals (links, mentions, reviews) that let an AI system trust your site as a source.
Should I run this checklist on every page or just my homepage?
Start with your most important 3–5 pages — the ones you’d most want an AI assistant to cite — rather than trying to audit an entire site at once.
None of this is exotic. It is the same discipline good SEO has always rewarded, just checked against a slightly different reader.
