What is a GEO audit? AI-search readiness, explained
What a GEO (generative engine optimisation) audit can and cannot check: AI crawler access, content structure, entity consistency, sources and snippet controls.
Draft · under review AI visibility tracking
Track what AI answers say about your clients, with the evidence
Keep a set of questions each client cares about, record what an AI tool answered, and SEO Sentinel analyses brand mentions, competitor mentions and citations of the client’s website over time.
How the data is collected: you ask the AI tool (for example ChatGPT or Perplexity) yourself and paste its answer. SEO Sentinel does not query, scrape or monitor ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews or any other AI service, needs no API keys and adds no AI usage costs. Every manual observation is labelled “Manually recorded — not independently verified.”
From tracked question to trend
- Set up the brand: name, alternative names, primary domain, target country and language.
- Add tracked questions one at a time or by CSV import, with topic, country and language. Near-identical duplicates are refused.
- Add competitors with their names and domains, so cited URLs can be attributed.
- Record observations: question, AI tool, optional model/mode, date, the response text and any cited URLs.
- Review the analysis: matched terms, excerpts, cited URLs with their owner, and the full answer with matches highlighted.
- Watch trends weekly or monthly, once there are enough observations to show one.
Deterministic analysis you can audit
No fuzzy matching, no sentiment guesses, no AI judging AI. Every number links back to exact text.
Mentions
The brand name, alternative names and domain are matched as whole words, ignoring case. “Acme” matches “ACME” and “Acme’s”, never “Acmeville”.
Citations
A citation is a cited URL on the brand’s own website, subdomains included. Look-alike domains don’t count, and a URL in the text is never counted as a name mention.
Competitor comparison
Your brand and every competitor are counted over the same set of observations, e.g. “mentioned in 3 of 12 observations”.
Trends without filler
Shown only when at least two periods have three or more observations. Empty weeks are gaps, never zero visibility. Nothing is estimated or smoothed.
Demo data kept apart
Synthetic answers carry a DEMO label, are never combined with recorded observations, never trigger alerts and can never appear in client reports.
No visibility score
A handful of samples can’t measure how often an AI tool recommends a business, so SEO Sentinel doesn’t pretend to.
AI visibility tracking vs. the GEO audit
| GEO audit | AI visibility tracking | |
|---|---|---|
| Looks at | The client’s pages and robots.txt | Answers an AI tool gave to a question |
| Collected | Automatically, during each audit | Recorded by you (or labelled demo data) |
| Tells you | Whether the site is easy to access and understand | Whether the brand was mentioned or cited in those recorded answers |
| Can’t tell you | Whether AI tools will mention the site | How often an AI tool recommends the brand overall |
What it does not do
- Manual collection. Answers are only as complete as what was pasted; mentions outside a pasted excerpt can’t be found.
- Answers are samples, not rankings. They vary with time, location, account, conversation history and model.
- Exact matching. Misspellings and variants only match if added as alternative names; brands that are common words can match unrelated uses, so check the excerpts.
- No automated AI platform integration. An official-API provider may be added later as an opt-in with a cost guard; none exists today.
Learn
Related guides
AI crawlers and robots.txt: what each token controls
Which robots.txt tokens control AI search, AI training and user-triggered fetchers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) and how to test them.
Draft · under reviewExplore AI visibility with clearly labelled demo data
The demo shows the full workflow (questions, competitors, observations and trends) using synthetic answers marked as such.
SEO Sentinel is in private beta. Nothing is for sale yet and no card is ever requested.