Ranking #1 doesn't matter if the answer doesn't mention you.
People ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI box instead of clicking links. Each one names its sources. Either it names you or it names someone else. 16 of the 129 checks exist to change that answer.
Crawled, indexed, cited
- 01
Crawled
A bot fetched the page. Necessary, and close to worthless alone.
- 02
Indexed
The engine stored the page and can retrieve it. A real milestone; a whole category of tools exists to speed it up, and they stop here.
- 03
Cited
where Crawld worksAn answer engine named you as its source. Indexing makes you eligible. Whether you are cited depends on things indexing tools do not measure.
What the 16 GEO checks look at
Extractability
Engines quote passages, not pages. A fact stated plainly under a heading that matches the question is quotable. The same fact in paragraph eleven of an essay is not.
Server-rendered content
Googlebot will render your JavaScript eventually. Most answer-engine crawlers will not, and an empty root div is what they index.
Attribution
A named author, a date, an organisation, and the structured data that ties them together. An engine that cannot characterise a source prefers one it can.
Structure
Headings in order, schema that matches the page, an llms.txt that says which pages are worth reading. Schema that misdescribes a page is worse than none.
Crawler access
A robots.txt written for Googlebot in 2019 frequently blocks half the agents that matter now.
The engines tracked
Citation share is tracked per engine and per query, for the queries you compete on.
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.
Anthropic's own model, increasingly used for research and shopping. Checks whether your content is structured the way Claude's search actually reads it.
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.
New engines launch quarterly. When one does, the rubric gets a new check, not a rewrite.
What this measurement does not claim
Citation is recorded per query and per engine. There is no link from a citation back to the specific article that earned it, so claims like "posts with X are cited 41% more" are not something this data supports and you will not find them here.
Citation is zero-sum per answer. You are not clearing a threshold; you are competing against the two or three sources the model found easiest to use. A rising share for a competitor is information about you.
Why measurement is half of it
Most citation failures are writing problems: a claim that cannot be lifted, a page with nothing to attribute. That is why the editor runs these same checks on drafts before they publish, and why the audit's findings arrive as changes rather than a score to contemplate.
Citation tracking is included in Pro. Pricing →