Group 1: AI crawler access
Everything starts with whether AI engines may fetch your pages. A GEO checker parses your robots.txt for the AI user-agents — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended — and flags blocks. It also looks for llms.txt (a content map for AI agents), Link headers advertising your resources, and Content-Signal declarations of how AI may use your content.
To pass: explicitly allow the citation-producing search bots even if you block training crawlers, and publish an /llms.txt listing your key pages. This group is pass/fail in effect — blocked crawlers zero out everything else.
Group 2: content extractability
AI engines quote what they can parse. A checker verifies your core content exists in the server-rendered HTML (many AI crawlers don't run JavaScript), that you use semantic landmarks (main, article, section), that headings form a coherent outline, and that content is chunked into sections short enough to lift whole.
To pass: server-render your main copy, keep one H1 with logical H2/H3 nesting, and break long passages into sub-200-word sections with descriptive headings. Tables and lists help — they're the most extractable format there is.
Group 3: answer-shaped, quotable content
This is where GEO differs most from SEO. The checker looks for question-shaped headings, direct answers in the first sentence of each section, quotable statistics, FAQ-style coverage, comparison content, and openings that name their subject instead of starting with "it" or "we".
To pass: write answer-first. Each section should survive being quoted in isolation: a model lifting your first sentence should hand its user something complete and correct — that's precisely what gets cited.
Group 4: trust and attribution
Engines cite sources they can safely attribute. Checkers score author and entity information, an about/organization page, machine-readable dates (datePublished, dateModified), outbound citations to credible sources, content freshness, and JSON-LD whose entity actually matches the page.
To pass: add Article/Organization schema with real names and dates, cite your sources, and keep cornerstone content dated within the last 18 months.
Run one now (free)
WebAnalyzer's GEO checker runs 26 checks across these four groups on any URL and returns a 0–100 score with each failing check and its fix — free, no signup. If you're starting from the question "can ChatGPT even see my site?", start with the AI readiness checker instead; same engine, question-first framing.