Generative search

Could a system that has never heard of you describe what you do?

That is the whole of the GEO audit, expressed as one question. The findings are the specific places where the answer is currently no, ordered by how much each one costs you.

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Assessed across

Entity clarity — can the organisation be identified
Service definition — can the offerings be named
Authority — is expertise attributed and verifiable
Retrievability — is the content actually reachable
Consistency — does everything agree with everything else
Structured knowledge — is the markup accurate and useful

A useful way to understand what this audit measures is to imagine reading your website with no context whatsoever. No knowledge of your industry, no assumption about what a company with your name might do, no ability to infer from the photography that you are probably a law firm. Only the words, the structure and whatever can be verified elsewhere.

Most websites become surprisingly opaque under that reading. The home page describes an approach rather than an offering. The services page lists categories whose meaning depends on sector knowledge. The about page describes values. Nowhere does the site state, in a sentence a machine could extract, that this organisation provides these specific services to these specific people in these specific places.

The audit identifies exactly where that breaks down, which is almost always more specific and more fixable than the general impression suggests.

Method

How the audit is conducted

Automated evidence collection
The site is crawled and every observable signal collected: structured data, heading structure, entity naming, external corroboration, author attribution, technical accessibility and the presence or absence of definitional content.
Extraction test
We attempt to extract the facts a system would need — organisation identity, services, audience, locations, expertise — using only what the site provides. Each fact is recorded as extractable, inferable or absent.
Corroboration check
Whether the facts the site asserts are supported anywhere the organisation controls externally, and whether those sources agree with each other. Disagreement is more damaging than absence here.
Representation sampling
Where useful, we sample how current systems respond to prompts a prospective buyer might reasonably use, and record what is stated, omitted or stated incorrectly. This is indicative rather than a measurement.
Prioritisation and reporting
Findings are ordered by commercial consequence. A missing service definition for your highest-margin offering outranks a missing author attribution on the blog, regardless of which is easier to fix.

Findings

What the audit typically surfaces

These are the patterns that recur most often. Not every site has all of them, and very few sites have none.

Identity gaps

No machine-readable description of the organisation exists
The organisation names itself three different ways across the site
No external profile corroborates the website's claims
The legal entity and the trading name are never connected

Service gaps

Services are described collectively rather than individually
Offerings are named internally rather than as buyers would search
No page states who a service is for
The structured description contradicts the visible content

Authority gaps

Substantive content is published anonymously
Named authors have no described expertise
Every claim is generic enough to be unverifiable
The site restates common knowledge without adding anything

Retrievability gaps

Primary content arrives only after JavaScript executes
Key information sits behind an interaction
Automated access is blocked more broadly than intended
Pages exist but nothing links to them

Consistency gaps

Contact details differ between pages
An outdated service description survives in one corner
External profiles describe a business the website does not
Location claims vary between sources

Markup problems

Structured data describing content that is not on the page
Markup applied to the wrong type of entity
Declarations that exist in isolation without relationships
Historic markup for services no longer offered

Example finding

How a GEO finding reads

This is an illustration of the report format rather than a result from a real assessment.

High

Services Are Described Collectively Rather Than Individually

What we found: The organisation's four principal services are described together on a single page, in prose, under a heading that names none of them. No individual service page exists, and no structured description identifies any of them separately.
Why it matters: When someone asks a generative system which organisations provide one of these services specifically, the system must be able to identify that you provide it. A combined description forces an inference it may not make, and will not make confidently. The practical consequence is exclusion from exactly the queries where a buyer is closest to purchasing.
General direction: Give each service its own page, headed with the name a buyer would use rather than the internal one, stating plainly what it is, who it is for and what it involves. The structural work matters more here than the length of the writing.
How IXSEO can help: GEO Audit, followed by Content Intelligence for the service pages themselves.

Scoring

How GEO is scored

The GEO score reflects how completely the signals above are present, weighted towards the ones that are load-bearing. Entity identification and service definition carry more weight than author attribution, because a system that cannot establish what you do has no use for knowing who wrote about it.

The score is directional. It measures the observable properties of your website, not your standing inside any system, and it is presented with the explanation that makes it meaningful rather than as a number on its own.

Frequently asked questions

What does a GEO audit actually test?

Whether a system encountering your website with no prior knowledge could establish who you are, what you offer, who you serve, where you operate and why any of it should be believed. Every check reduces to some version of that question. The output is a list of the specific points where the answer is currently no.

How is this different from an SEO audit?

An SEO audit asks whether pages can be found and ranked for queries. A GEO audit asks whether facts about the organisation can be extracted and stated with confidence. A site can pass the first comprehensively and fail the second, and in our experience most do — particularly sites with strong brand recognition, because they have never needed to explain themselves.

Do we need an SEO audit first?

Not necessarily, but the GEO audit assumes the site is crawlable. If it is not, the GEO findings will be dominated by that single issue and the audit will be less useful than it should be. The free snapshot establishes this in a minute, and we will tell you if the sequence should be reversed.

Will you tell us which AI systems currently mention us?

We can sample how systems respond to a set of relevant prompts and report what we observe, with the caveat that responses vary between sessions, regions and model versions. That sampling is indicative rather than a measurement, and we present it as such. It is not a ranking, and it should not be tracked as though it were one.

What does the audit produce?

A prioritised set of findings in the same format as every IXSEO report, a set of scores for entity clarity, service definition, authority signals and retrievability, and a sequenced direction for addressing the gaps. Where a gap requires a business decision rather than a website change — such as who is prepared to be named as the expert behind the content — that is flagged as such.

ServiceGEOThe wider discipline, and how it extends rather than replaces search optimisation.ServiceGEO StrategyWhat to do once the audit has established the gaps.IntelligenceGEO intelligenceThe automated module: what it checks and how to interpret its findings.

Find out what your website currently states about you

The free GEO readiness checker runs the entity and structure checks against your live site immediately. It covers the mechanical part of this audit and will tell you whether the deeper work is warranted.

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