# The complete GEO audit methodology

<span class="byline">by John Morabito · April 18, 2026 · 18 min read</span>

**TL;DR**
- A Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) audit has seven steps: inventory, chunk audit, schema audit, entity audit, citation analysis, competitive delta, and roadmap.
- Each step produces a scored artifact you can hand to a content team for execution. Not a slide deck.
- Steal the whole thing. Execution is the moat, not the methodology.

## Step 1: Inventory

The inventory step builds the ground truth for everything that follows. You cannot audit what you cannot classify.

**What to do**
1. Run a full crawl. Screaming Frog for sites under 10k URLs. Firecrawl or DataForSEO On-Page API for larger or JS-heavy sites.
2. Classify every URL by template: home, pillar, blog, product, category, landing, about, contact, legal, admin.
3. Measure word count, H-tag density, internal link count per URL.
4. Export to CSV. This CSV is the artifact Steps 2 and 3 reference.

**Skill prompt**
```
Skill: winston-tech-audit

Crawl {client_domain} and classify each URL by template.
Output CSV: url, template, word_count, h2_count, h3_count,
internal_links_in, internal_links_out, schema_types.
```

## Step 2: Chunk audit

AI engines quote passages, not pages. So every H2 section must work as a standalone citable unit.

**What to do**
1. Sample 10-25% of URLs per template. Full coverage for pillars.
2. Score each H2 section on the 0-1-2 rubric.
3. Compute page-level average and site-level median.
4. Record top three failure patterns per template.

**0-1-2 rubric**
- **0**. No H2 structure or buried headings.
- **1**. H2s exist, but openings are pronoun-dependent.
- **2**. Every H2 opens with a direct-answer sentence.

## Step 3: Schema audit

Schema.org JSON-LD is the cheapest GEO win available. AI engines read it before they read prose.

**What to do**
1. For every template, check: Article/BlogPosting, FAQPage, HowTo, Organization, Person, WebSite, BreadcrumbList.
2. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test and schema.org's validator.
3. Check Person schema consistency across author bylines.
4. Verify Organization schema has sameAs links to LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and category directories.

**Common failure modes**
- FAQ schema does not match visible FAQ copy.
- Multiple conflicting Organization blocks on the same page.
- HowTo schema with zero steps because the author copied the template literally.

## Step 4: Entity audit

The test question: can a model, given only your site, write one accurate paragraph describing your category, top three services, and two pieces of credibility proof?

**What to do**
1. Audit the About page for category, founder, three specific service areas.
2. Person schema on every author byline with sameAs links.
3. Organization schema with `knowsAbout`, `areaServed`, `memberOf`.
4. Run a prompt against Claude and ChatGPT: "Based on {domain}, describe what this company does." Note what the engines get wrong.

## Step 5: Citation analysis

This is where the audit becomes an ongoing instrument, not a one-shot deliverable.

**What to do**
1. Build 50-200 buyer-intent prompts in the client's category.
2. Run prompts against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews.
3. Classify cited domains: client, direct competitor, publisher, Reddit/Quora, other.
4. Compute citation share per engine and per prompt cluster.
5. Re-run weekly. Track deltas.

## Step 6: Competitive delta

Map your site's scores from Steps 2-4 against the competitors surfaced in Step 5.

**What to do**
1. Pick the top five cited competitors.
2. Run the chunk, schema, and entity audits against each using the same rubric.
3. Build a 5-column comparison table across the four dimensions.
4. Flag any dimension where your score is more than 0.5 below the competitor median.

## Step 7: Roadmap

Sequence by impact-to-effort. High-impact-low-effort first.

1. **Weeks 1-2**. Schema fixes. Fastest win.
2. **Weeks 3-6**. Chunk rewrites on pillar pages. Top 20 highest-traffic.
3. **Weeks 7-10**. Entity content. Rebuild About, add Person schema with sameAs.
4. **Weeks 11-12**. Citation-source seeding on publisher sites.

Re-audit at week 13.

## The scoring rubric

| Dimension | 0 | 1 | 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chunk readiness | No structure | Pronoun-dependent | Self-contained |
| Schema coverage | None or broken | Partial | Full + validated |
| Entity clarity | No story | About exists, no schema | Consistent signal |
| Citation presence | Zero | <20% of prompts | 20%+ across engines |

Median below 1.5 is a GEO engagement worth taking on.

## FAQ

**How long does a GEO audit take?**

40 hours of agent-plus-human work over 48 hours of wall clock for a 50-to-200 page site.

**Do we need to run this against every AI engine separately?**

Yes for Step 5. Different engines pull from different indexes with different citation logic.

**What tools are absolutely required?**

A crawler (Screaming Frog or Firecrawl), a SERP data provider (DataForSEO or Ahrefs), and API access to at least two AI engines.

**How often should we re-audit?**

Full audit quarterly. Citation analysis weekly. Schema and chunk spot checks after any major content release.

**What's the minimum content footprint for GEO to matter?**

Roughly 20 indexed pages. Below that you do not have enough surface area for refactoring to compound.