What Should an AEO or GEO Audit Include?

The main areas a useful audit should cover

Relevant customer questions

An assessment needs questions that reflect what potential customers want to know.

These might concern service suitability, pricing factors, alternatives, delivery arrangements or common concerns. Your sales and customer-service teams can provide useful input where available.

The audit should explain why the selected questions matter. A long list has limited value if most questions are unrelated to the customers you want to attract.

A starting assessment of AI visibility

Within the agreed scope, the audit should record whether collected answers mention your business, cite your website or include relevant competitors.

These findings should identify the platform and date of the checks. They provide a starting point for comparison, rather than a complete picture of every answer a customer could receive.

Ask the provider to explain the findings in plain language and identify any limitations.

Gaps in important website pages

The audit should review whether priority pages provide enough information for prospective customers to assess your offer.

For a service business, this could include missing explanations about suitability, service coverage, exclusions or the next step after an enquiry.

Recommendations should identify the affected page and what needs improving. “Create better content” is too general to guide implementation.

Technical issues relevant to discovery

The technical review should examine relevant access settings, indexing issues, internal links and other obstacles affecting the agreed pages.

Recommendations must reflect the platform being assessed. Google’s guidance, for example, explains that established SEO practices remain relevant to its generative AI search features and that special AI schema markup is not required. Google’s official guidance.

The audit should explain the purpose of each technical recommendation, rather than treating a generic checklist as sufficient.

Clarity and consistency of business information

An audit can identify unclear or conflicting descriptions of your business across the website and selected profiles.

It may also highlight where additional information would help, such as clearer service details or an explanation of the team’s relevant experience.

Your business remains responsible for confirming factual details. If credentials, results or project examples are unavailable, the recommendations should acknowledge that dependency.

Priorities and implementation requirements

A useful audit ends with an action plan.

You should be able to distinguish urgent fixes from improvements that can wait. Each recommendation should explain what needs doing, which page or system it affects and who needs to be involved.

Where further investigation is required, that should be stated clearly.

What should the final deliverable look like?

The format can vary, but the findings should be easy to use.

A shorter report with clear priorities can be more useful than a large document filled with unexplained scores.

Does an audit include implementation?

Do not assume that it does.

An audit may provide findings and recommendations only. Content writing, publishing, technical changes and ongoing monitoring may be separate services.

Before agreeing to the work, ask whether the fee includes discussing the findings and whether implementation can be added.

If your team will make the changes, check that the recommendations are detailed enough to act on.

What should raise questions about an audit?

Ask for clarification if the report relies mainly on a single screenshot, provides an unexplained score or recommends more content without reviewing existing pages.

Guaranteed placement claims also deserve scrutiny. A provider can identify opportunities and implement changes, but it does not control a platform’s answers.

The audit should help you make a decision about the work required, including whether some activities can be handled within an existing campaign.

Frequently asked questions

Is an AEO audit different from a GEO audit?

Providers may use these names for overlapping work. Compare the actual scope, including platforms, website checks and deliverables, rather than assuming the labels describe completely separate services.

Can an audit be useful for a small website?

Yes, if it focuses on relevant questions and priority pages. A small website may benefit more from a focused review than a broad assessment covering services or markets it does not serve.

What access is needed?

An initial public review may require little access. A deeper assessment may need analytics, search-performance information or technical input. The provider should explain what is needed and why.

How often should an audit be repeated?

That depends on the changes being made and the questions that remain. Review after substantial website changes or when new evidence indicates a problem. Ongoing campaign checks may reduce the need to repeat a full audit.

Turn the findings into a practical plan

GenieCrawl’s GEO services can support the review of your existing visibility and website priorities. Where the findings identify work to implement, our AEO services can support agreed content and technical improvements.

Request a free audit and proposal to discuss the appropriate starting scope and whether you also need implementation support.