How the audit actually works

How scoring works

Your Readiness score is grounded in deterministic checks: measured signals from your live site, evaluated in code against a fixed rubric. The same site produces the same score, every run. On top of that, an AI analysis pass adds depth — but it is anchored to the measured signals, not free to improvise.

Your AI Visibility score comes from the measured probe above. The two blend into one Overall score across six categories:

• AI citability — Whether your content is structured so an AI engine can lift a passage and cite it — self-contained answers, extractable facts, question-shaped structure.
• Brand authority — Whether your brand exists in the places AI engines actually draw citations from — community discussion, reference sources, video, professional networks.
• Content quality (E-E-A-T) — Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust signals — the framework engines use to decide whether a source deserves to be cited at all.
• Technical foundations — Whether AI crawlers can physically reach and read your content: crawler access, server-side rendering, site health. AI crawlers do not run JavaScript — sites fail here silently.
• Structured data — Machine-readable entity information — who you are, what you offer — validated, not just detected.
• Platform readiness — Per-platform checks for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, because each selects sources differently.

We publish the categories, not the individual checks and weights — that's the part competitors would like us to hand over.

The QA gate & refund

Before a report reaches you it passes an automated QA gate: completeness of every section, presence and consistency of scores, and evidence backing the findings. A report that fails the gate is automatically retried; if it still can't pass, it is held for human review — and if we can't deliver, you get a full refund. You will never receive a report that didn't pass.

What we refuse to do

The GEO industry has a snake-oil problem. These are written rules enforced in our report pipeline — not marketing copy:

• No projected traffic or revenue figures.

  “This fix is worth £4,000/month” sounds great and is unmeasurable. Our reports may only state impact we observed — e.g. “ChatGPT's crawler cannot retrieve your pricing page, so ChatGPT cannot cite it.”

• No guarantees of rankings or citations.

  AI answers are probabilistic — anyone guaranteeing you a citation is guessing. We measure where you stand and fix what's measurably in your way.

• No stats without a source.

  Every research claim in our reports traces to published research or our own measurements. When evidence is correlational, we say so.

• No selling fixes the evidence doesn't support.

  When the evidence for a tactic weakens — as it has for some once-fashionable GEO tactics — we downgrade or drop it, and note it in the changelog below.

We run it on ourselves — current score: 41/100

Every methodology version is run against citeify.ai before it ships — same pipeline, same scoring, no special treatment. Our current result under v2026.08: Readiness 82/100, measured AI Visibility 0/100, Overall 41/100. Zero visibility means that across 120 recorded AI answers to buyer questions in our own niche, no engine cited citeify.ai. We publish that willingly: it is the honest starting point of a brand that is weeks old, and the number every future re-audit gets measured against.

The instrument itself is on display in the run history: two audits of the unchanged site scored an identical 76 Readiness — same site, same score — and after a set of fixes our own report recommended, the next run measured 82. Flat when nothing changes, moves when something does.

Read our full audit report (PDF) →

Methodology changelog

AI search changes monthly; an audit that doesn't is worthless. Every change to what we measure is versioned and dated here. Your PDF report carries the methodology version it was produced under.