What Is a GEO Score? We Built a Free AI-Readiness Scanner

SEO has had free diagnostic tools for over a decade. PageSpeed Insights. Lighthouse. Moz's domain checker. Screaming Frog. You can audit your search health in minutes, for free, from a dozen different tools.

GEO has had nothing.

No free tool that tells you whether AI models can even read your site. No score that tells you if ChatGPT is likely to cite your content or skip it entirely. No quick way to know if your website is AI-ready or invisible.

We built one. It's called GEO Score, and it's free — a generative engine optimization score for any website, in 30 seconds.

What GEO Score actually does

Enter any URL. In about 30 seconds, you get a score from 0 to 100 — your website's AI-readiness rating.

The scanner analyses 15 signals across 5 categories, checks how your site looks to an AI model trying to extract and cite information, and tells you exactly where the gaps are. No login required. No cost. No LLM calls — it's entirely rule-based, using a headless browser to crawl your pages the way an AI retrieval system would.

The score bands:

After scanning dozens of sites across categories, most land in the 35-65 range. Even brands with strong SEO — solid DA, good rankings, healthy traffic — consistently score under 50 on AI-readiness. If you're new to what GEO is and why it matters, the short version: it's the practice of making your brand visible in AI-generated answers. The gap between SEO health and GEO health is real, and it's wider than most marketers expect.

The 5 categories we measure

Each category tests a different layer of AI-readiness. Here's what they are and why they matter.

1. AI Discoverability (25 points)

Can AI models actually find and access your content?

This is the foundation layer. We check whether your robots.txt allows AI crawlers — many sites block GPTBot, Google-Extended, or ClaudeBot without realising it. We verify your sitemap is accessible and properly formatted. We test whether key pages load and render correctly for automated crawlers.

This is where we find the most common instant-fail issue: brands accidentally blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt. One Disallow: / rule for GPTBot means ChatGPT's web browsing feature will never see your content. A two-minute fix that changes everything.

2. Content Structure (25 points)

Is your content formatted in a way that AI models can parse and extract from?

AI models don't read pages the way humans do. They look for structure — headings that signal topic hierarchy, FAQ sections that map directly to user questions, content that has enough depth to be worth citing, and internal links that help the model understand your site's information architecture.

We check heading hierarchy, FAQ and Q&A formatting, content depth, and internal linking patterns. Sites with well-structured content — clear H2/H3 hierarchies, FAQ sections on product and service pages, author bylines — score 15-20 points higher than sites with similar technical signals but flat, unstructured content.

3. Schema & Metadata (20 points)

Are you giving AI models structured data they can extract without guessing?

JSON-LD structured data is the single most underused signal in GEO. Product schema, Review schema, FAQ schema — these tell AI models exactly what your page is about, how it's rated, and what questions it answers.

We also check meta descriptions and Open Graph tags. These aren't just for Google and social sharing anymore — AI retrieval systems use them as quick summaries when deciding whether to include your content in a recommendation.

4. Authority Signals (15 points)

Does your site signal that it's a credible, trustworthy source?

AI models weigh source credibility when building recommendations. We check for author attribution — do your articles have named authors? — along with trust indicators like an about page, contact information, and privacy policy. We also check content freshness — stale content that hasn't been updated in years signals lower reliability.

This category is where the gap between branded and unbranded sites shows up most clearly. Sites with clear authorship, transparent company information, and regularly updated content score significantly higher.

5. AI-Specific Optimisation (15 points)

Have you done anything specifically to help AI models cite you?

This is the newest and least understood category. We check for llms.txt — a plain text file at your domain root that tells AI models where your best content lives. We look for AI-optimised content patterns like comparison pages, buying guides, and "best of" roundups — the exact content formats that AI models use when building product recommendations.

Almost nobody scores well here. The average site has no llms.txt, no comparison content, and no content structured specifically for AI extraction. This is where the competitive advantage lives — because if your competitors aren't doing it either, being first matters.

What we found scanning real sites

After running GEO Score across dozens of sites — Indian D2C brands, SaaS companies, media sites, agencies — a few patterns emerged.

The average score is shockingly low. Most sites land between 35 and 65. Even brands spending heavily on SEO score under 50 on AI-readiness. The signals that matter for GEO are different enough from traditional SEO that a high DA doesn't predict a high GEO Score.

The most common failures are basic. Here are the five issues we see most often, ranked by how easy they are to fix:

These aren't exotic technical issues — they're gaps nobody has been measuring until now.

Content structure punches above its weight. A site with average technical signals but excellent content structure — well-organised headings, FAQ sections, author bylines, internal linking — consistently scores 15-20 points higher than a technically sound site with flat, unstructured content. If you can only fix one category, start with content structure.

Even GEO companies have gaps. One $96M-funded GEO competitor scored 72. Respectable — but still in the "Needs Work" band, not AI-Ready. The lesson: knowing about GEO and being optimised for it are different things. For context on what "good" looks like in practice, our India D2C benchmark data shows that brands with strong AI visibility tend to have well-structured sites — but even category leaders have blind spots.

Three fixes that make the biggest difference

If your GEO Score is below 60, these three fixes will move the needle fastest.

1. Unblock AI crawlers in robots.txt

This is a two-minute fix with outsized impact. Open your robots.txt and check whether you're blocking any of these user agents: GPTBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, CCBot. If you are, remove the Disallow rules. There's no reason to block AI crawlers unless you have specific content licensing concerns — and if you do, block selectively, not site-wide.

2. Add JSON-LD structured data

Start with two schemas: Organization on your homepage and Article on every blog post. If you're an ecommerce brand, add Product schema to your product pages. This is the structured data equivalent of handing AI models a cheat sheet — instead of making them guess what your page is about, you're telling them explicitly.

3. Create an llms.txt file

This is the biggest competitive advantage because almost nobody has one yet. An llms.txt file at your domain root tells AI models where your best content lives — your key product pages, your about page, your most authoritative blog posts. It's the equivalent of robots.txt but for AI models looking for content to cite, not just crawl.

We wrote about the full implementation in our product pages article, and our own llms.txt is live at getcited.in/llms.txt if you want to see a working example.

Why we built this free

SEO didn't become a discipline overnight. It grew because tools like PageSpeed Insights and Moz's free checkers helped millions of marketers understand what mattered. They made the invisible visible. They created a shared language for measuring website health.

GEO needs the same thing. Right now, most brand marketers know AI visibility matters but have no way to measure where they stand. They can't benchmark against competitors. They can't prioritise fixes. They can't show their CMO a number that says "we have a problem" or "we're ahead."

GEO Score is our contribution to that. Free forever, for any website, no login required. We built it because the ecosystem needs it.

For brands that want to go deeper — actual AI response analysis across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, with mention rates, sentiment, positioning, and competitive benchmarking — that's what our GEO audits do. GEO Score tells you if your site is AI-ready. A free GEO audit tells you if AI is actually recommending you — 20 prompts, 3 platforms, results within 24 hours.

Here's what I'd suggest: scan your site. Then scan a competitor. The gap between those two numbers will tell you exactly where to start.