Ranking #1 doesn't matter if the answer doesn't mention you.
People stopped clicking blue links and started asking. Almost nothing tells you whether you are the site being cited, which is a different measurement from rank, and needs a different instrument.
Crawled, indexed, cited: three different things
These get used interchangeably and they describe three states. The distance between the second and the third is where AI-referred traffic is won or lost.
- 01
Crawled
A bot fetched the page. That is all it means: necessary, and close to worthless alone. A page can be crawled daily for a year and appear in nothing.
- 02
Indexed
The engine stored the page and can retrieve it. A real milestone and a real bottleneck, and a whole category of tools exists to accelerate it. They also stop here, which is reasonable: the next step is a different problem.
- 03
Cited
where Crawld worksAn answer engine named you as its source. Indexing makes you eligible. Whether you are actually cited depends on things indexing tools do not measure and cannot influence.
What the 16 GEO checks look at
Sixteen of the 129 checks sit in the AI / answer-engine readiness category, which carries 12% of the overall score. They are not a separate product bolted on. They are graded in the same rubric, with the same three outcomes, and an unmeasured GEO check is never counted as a pass.
Extractability
Whether a claim on the page can be lifted as an answer. Engines quote passages, not pages: a fact stated plainly under a heading that matches the question is quotable, and the same fact in the eleventh paragraph of an essay is not.
Server-rendered content
Whether the page ships its content in its HTML. Googlebot will render JavaScript on a second pass it schedules at its convenience. Most answer-engine crawlers will not, and an empty root div is what they index.
Attribution signals
Whether the page gives an engine something to credit: a named author, a date, an organisation, the structured data that ties them together. An engine that cannot characterise a source often prefers one it can.
Machine-readable structure
Headings in order, structured data that matches what the page actually contains, and an llms.txt that says which of your pages are worth reading. Schema that misdescribes a page is worse than none.
Crawler access
Whether the AI crawlers are permitted at all. A robots.txt written for Googlebot in 2019 frequently blocks half the agents that matter now, silently.
The engines tracked
Citation share is tracked per engine and per prompt: for the queries you actually compete on, who got cited: you, or someone else.
Anthropic's own model, increasingly used for research and shopping. Checks whether your content is structured the way Claude's search actually reads it.
The largest AI answer engine by users. Tracks whether ChatGPT's browsing and search cite your pages, not just the competitor who out-ranked you on Google.
Built into Search, Workspace, and Android. Tracks whether Gemini's answers reference you when it actually matters, not just that you rank.
Built to cite its sources by design, which means it either credits you or it credits someone else. Tracks your citation share directly.
Sits above the normal results now, and pulls from a narrower slice of the page than classic ranking does. The technical checks are tuned to what it actually lifts.
Built into Windows, Edge, and Bing. Same rubric, same fix queue, no separate setup.
Still the index behind Copilot and half the AI crawlers on the web. The classic search checks cover it. Indexed here means visible in far more places than bing.com.
The fastest-growing open-weight model, already embedded in apps you've never heard of. Same rubric, same tracking, whichever wrapper someone's asking it through.
What this measurement does not claim
Citation share is recorded per prompt and per engine. There is currently no link from a citation back to the specific article that earned it, which means claims of the form "posts with X are cited 41% more" are not something this data can support, and you will not find them anywhere on this site.
Citation is also zero-sum per answer. You are not clearing a threshold; you are competing against whichever two or three sources the model found easiest to use. A rising share for a competitor is information about you.
Why this is a separate discipline
Rank tracking tells you your position on a results page a growing share of your audience never sees. Index checkers tell you the page is stored. Neither tells you whether an engine named you when someone asked the question your page answers, and answering that means asking the engines, repeatedly, and recording who got credited.