What is generative engine optimization?
If you are asking what is generative engine optimization, it is the practice of making your brand easy for generative AI systems to find, understand and quote when they answer a question. Generative engines write an answer from sources, instead of listing links. So the target moves from ranking a page to being one of the sources, and being named in the text that results.
It overlaps with classic SEO more than the new vocabulary suggests. A site that is crawlable, clear and trusted tends to do better in both. What is genuinely new is the measurement. In search you read a position. In generative answers you read whether you were named, and that has to be sampled, because the answer is different each time.
A GEO audit is how you take that first reading. It tells you where you start, which is the only way to know later whether anything you did made a difference. The answer half is the same check the AI visibility checker runs.
AEO audit and GEO audit: the same exercise
The question of answer engine optimization vs generative engine optimization comes up constantly, and for audit purposes the difference is small. Answer engine optimization grew out of featured snippets and voice answers. Generative engine optimization grew out of large language models writing answers. In practice both ask whether an engine finds you, trusts you and uses you.
So an aeo audit and a geo audit look at the same things: access, readability, and whether you are named and cited. If you see an aeo/geo audit offered as one product, that is why. We cover both on this page rather than splitting them into two thin ones, and we use whichever name a buyer searched for in the headings.
Where the two terms do differ is the audience. AEO is the older term and is common among SEO teams. GEO is more common in marketing and agency circles. Neither is a standard, and a tool that claims one is more official than the other is selling the label.
A GEO audit checklist you can start today
Any geo audit checklist should be short enough to finish. This one is built from what the product actually checks, in the order we would work through it. An aeo audit checklist would look the same, and so would a generative engine optimization checklist from a good source. Treat the order as a suggestion, since access comes first.
You can do the first two steps by hand on any site. The rest need engines to be asked questions, which is where a tool earns its place. For ChatGPT alone, see the ChatGPT visibility checker.
- Open your robots.txt and look for OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User
- View the source of your homepage and confirm the main text is in the HTML
- Write ten questions a buyer would ask before choosing a brand like yours
- Ask each of the main engines, with web search on, and note who is named
- List the pages cited for each question and mark the ones that are yours
- Name the three questions you lose and the page type that wins them
- Write or fix one page for the biggest gap, then run the same questions again
Choosing a geo audit tool
There are more geo audit tools than there are good ones. A report that scores your site out of a hundred in two seconds has not asked an engine anything. Whatever it shows, it can only be reading your pages. A real geo audit for ai readiness queries the engines, keeps the answers and lets you open them.
The same goes for an aeo audit tool, and for an aeo geo audit tool that claims to cover both names in one pass. It goes for any answer engine optimization tool too. Ask five things. Which engines does it query? Is web search on? How is a mention detected? Are old runs kept? And is the cost shown before it runs? The same questions apply to generative engine optimization tools in general, and the crowded list is mostly sorted by the answers.
Looking for a geo audit tool, or several geo audit tools to compare, is easier once you know which half each one covers. A geo seo audit also needs a site-side half. Some tools only measure answers and some only inspect your site. You want both in one place, because the site findings explain the answer findings. If the crawler is blocked, the answer is going to be unsympathetic no matter how good your pages are. For titles, links and speed, run the content audit tool alongside it.
Is there a free GEO audit?
People look for a free geo audit, a free geo audit tool or a geo audit tool free of charge, and a free aeo audit gets searched too. The honest answer is that the site half can be done free by hand, using the checklist above. The answer half cannot, because each question is a paid call to each engine.
That is why there is no free tier here, and why the price of a run is shown before it starts. A free geo audit that returns an instant score is reading your pages, not asking the engines. It can be useful as a quick look at your robots.txt, but it is not an audit of whether you are named.
On how to do generative engine optimization once the audit is done: fix access first, then readability, then write for the questions you lose in the SEO content editor. A generative engine optimization strategy that starts with publishing thirty articles, before you know which question you are losing, starts in the wrong place.