GEO Technical Audit Checklist: 7 Fixes That Get Your Site Cited by AI

Bottom line: AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Grok can only cite content they can crawl, parse, and trust. A 2026 analysis of 10,000+ AI-cited pages shows that seven technical factors separate cited sites from invisible ones. Fix them in priority order and you remove the barriers between your content and an AI-generated answer.

Why a technical audit matters for GEO

Traditional SEO audits focus on crawlability and keyword placement. A GEO audit goes further — it checks whether your pages give AI engines the structured signals they need to extract, trust, and cite your content. Missing even one signal (like schema markup or a publish date) can drop your citation rate by 30-50% for a given query.

The checklist below is ordered by impact. Start at the top.

The 7-point GEO technical audit

1. Add structured data (FAQ, HowTo, Article schema)

Priority: HIGH — immediate

AI engines use JSON-LD schema to distinguish content types. Without it, a crawler sees a wall of text and has to guess whether your page is a how-to guide, an FAQ, or a product comparison.

What to do:

Add FAQPage schema to any page with Q&A content

Add HowTo schema to tutorial and process pages

Add Article schema (with author, datePublished, dateModified) to every blog post and editorial page

Validate with Google's Rich Results Test — if Google can parse it, AI engines can too

2. Write a keyword-rich H1

Priority: HIGH — immediate

An empty or generic H1 means AI can't identify your page topic in a single pass. Crawlers weight the H1 heavily when deciding what query a page answers.

What to do:

Every indexable page gets exactly one H1

Include your primary keyword naturally — "GEO Technical Audit Checklist" not "Our Latest Post"

Keep it under 60 characters so it isn't truncated in citations

3. Add a TL;DR / BLUF summary

Priority: HIGH — immediate

AI engines extract the most concise, direct answer they can find. If your page buries the answer below 500 words of introduction, the engine will cite a competitor who leads with it.

What to do:

Add a 2-3 sentence summary at the very top of every key page (below the H1, above everything else)

State the main claim, the evidence, and the takeaway

Bold it or wrap it in a block so crawlers can identify it structurally

4. Include datePublished and dateModified

Priority: HIGH — immediate

AI engines penalize undated content. If a crawler can't judge freshness, it defaults to assuming the content is stale — and stale content loses citations to fresher alternatives.

What to do:

Add in your HTML

Set og:updated_time and article:modified_time Open Graph meta tags

Include datePublished and dateModified in your Article JSON-LD

Update dateModified whenever you make substantive edits

5. Create listicle and comparison content

Priority: HIGH — content

A 2025 GEO benchmark study found that 53% of AI citations come from ranked lists and comparison pages. If you don't have this content type, you're invisible for over half of citation-eligible queries.

What to do:

Audit your top 20 target queries — how many are "best X," "X vs Y," or "top X for Z"?

Create dedicated comparison and ranked-list pages for each

Use tables and numbered lists (AI engines parse these more reliably than prose)

Content format | Share of AI citations | Effort
Ranked lists ("Top 10...") | ~30% | Medium
Comparison pages ("X vs Y") | ~23% | Medium
How-to guides | ~18% | Low-Medium
FAQ pages | ~15% | Low
Long-form editorial | ~14% | High

6. Build a hub-and-spoke internal link structure

Priority: HIGH — content

Insufficient internal linking means AI can't connect your related content into a coherent knowledge graph. A hub page ("GEO Guide") linking to spoke pages ("GEO for SaaS," "GEO Technical Audit," "GEO Content Strategy") signals topical authority.

What to do:

Identify 3-5 topic hubs for your domain

Create a pillar page for each hub with 500+ words of overview content

Link every spoke page back to its hub and to 2-3 sibling spokes

Add contextual cross-links within body content (not just nav menus)

7. Add author bylines with credentials

Priority: MEDIUM

AI engines assess trust partly through authorship signals. A page with "By Jane Smith, Senior Data Engineer at Acme" carries more weight than an anonymous page — especially for YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) topics.

What to do:

Add a visible author name, title, and 1-line bio to every article

Link to the author's LinkedIn or professional profile

Use author fields in your Article JSON-LD schema

AI crawler accessibility: the foundation layer

None of the seven fixes above matter if AI crawlers can't reach your pages in the first place. Three infrastructure checks come before everything else:

Server-side rendering (SSR). AI crawlers — GPTBot, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot — generally do not execute JavaScript. If your site is a client-rendered SPA, these crawlers see an empty . Switch to SSR or static generation for all pages you want cited.

robots.txt configuration. Many sites still block AI crawlers by default. Explicitly allow them:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: anthropic-ai
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Page load speed. AI crawlers have aggressive timeout thresholds. If your page takes more than 2 seconds to return HTML, the crawler moves on. Aim for sub-1-second Time to First Byte (TTFB) on all key pages.

Priority matrix: where to start

Priority | Items | Expected impact
HIGH (immediate) | Schema, H1, BLUF, dates | Fixes parsing failures — unlocks citations
HIGH (content) | Listicles, hub-and-spoke | Covers 53%+ of citation-eligible queries
MEDIUM | Byline, external links | Increases trust score for borderline citations
Foundation | SSR, robots.txt, page speed | Without these, nothing else works

FAQ

How long does it take to see citation improvements after fixing these issues? AI engines re-crawl at different intervals. Perplexity indexes within days; ChatGPT's browse mode can pick up changes within a week. Expect measurable citation lift within 2-4 weeks of deploying fixes, assuming your content is otherwise strong.

Do I need all seven fixes, or can I pick a few? Start with the four HIGH-immediate items (schema, H1, BLUF, dates). These are the lowest-effort, highest-impact fixes. If your site already has strong content, these four alone can meaningfully increase your citation rate.

Will these changes hurt my traditional SEO? No. Every item on this checklist is either neutral or positive for Google rankings. Structured data, fast load times, clear H1 tags, and internal linking are standard SEO best practices. GEO optimization is additive, not a tradeoff.

How do I measure whether AI engines are citing my site? Manually: run your target queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Grok, then check whether your brand or URL appears in the response. At scale: use a GEO monitoring platform like Aeolo to track citation rates across engines and queries automatically.

Aeolo runs this audit automatically across every page on your domain and tracks citation changes over time. Request beta access to see your GEO technical score.