GEO Readiness Checklist.
24 checks across five areas that determine whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews can find, trust and quote your site. Tick what’s already true — your progress saves automatically in this browser.
Your biggest gaps.
The sections furthest from ready, based on what you’ve ticked so far.
Want the gaps closed, not just found?
We run full GEO audits for agency and in-house teams — schema fixes, crawler access, content restructuring, the lot. Leave your details and we’ll follow up with a scoped plan built around what you just checked.
Your details go straight to Figment’s team. If that doesn’t work, your email app opens with everything pre-filled instead.
Why GEO readiness now decides whether you get cited.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of making a site easy for a large language model to quote, not just easy for a crawler to index. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews and Copilot all answer a question by assembling a handful of sources and citing them, and ranking on page one of the classic results no longer guarantees you are one of them. What tends to decide it is whether your page states a clear, extractable answer near the top, whether your entity, credentials and locations are declared in machine-readable JSON-LD, whether the content is structured into scannable question-shaped headings, and whether your brand is corroborated elsewhere on the web. Those are precisely the areas this checklist scores.
How to work through your score.
Answer the 24 checks honestly — an optimistic score is worthless. The tool then ranks your weakest areas so you can see which category is genuinely holding you back instead of fixing whatever happens to be easiest. Start with the structural items: direct-answer formatting, heading hierarchy and schema markup are usually the cheapest to fix and the fastest to show up as AI citations. Authority and corroboration signals take longer and belong in a quarterly plan rather than a sprint. Re-score the same site every couple of months, because GEO readiness is a moving target as the models change what they reward.
The single most common blocker we find has nothing to do with content: robots.txt or a CDN rule quietly denying the AI crawlers. The AI search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot) are separate user agents from Googlebot, and several security plugins and bot-fight settings block them by default. If those are shut out, AI answer engines can’t fetch your pages, so confirm access before you spend a quarter rewriting them. Training crawlers such as GPTBot and Google-Extended are a separate decision: blocking them opts you out of model training, not out of AI search.
Related tools.
Two of the checklist categories are big enough to have their own tool, and both are worth running alongside your score.
- Schema Markup Grader — a meaningful part of your checklist score rests on structured data. This grades the JSON-LD your pages actually ship, property by property, against what each page type needs.
- SEO Traffic Value Calculator — AI-search readiness is easier to fund when it has a number attached. This prices the organic traffic your existing impressions and positions represent, and the value still out of reach in positions four to twenty.
