24% of ChatGPT conversations are information searches. 800 million people use ChatGPT every week. And when one of your potential customers asks "what is the best tool for X?", the AI answers with 2 to 7 brands.
If your company is not among those 2 to 7, you do not exist in that buying decision.
The uncomfortable question: do you know whether you appear or not? Most B2B companies do not. This guide gives you the exact method to check it in the next 30 minutes, without paid tools.
What a GEO audit is (and why it is not the same as an SEO audit)
A GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) audit is the process of checking whether your company, product, or brand appears cited in the responses of generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Copilot when someone searches for what you sell.
The difference with a traditional SEO audit is concrete:
- SEO measures positions on a list of 10 links.
- GEO measures mentions within a response generated by AI.
- In SEO you compete against the top 10. In GEO you compete to be one of the 2 to 7 sources the AI decides to cite.
There is no Google Search Console for ChatGPT. The audit is done manually, with a clear method.
The 5 steps of a GEO audit
Step 1. Define the prompts your customers actually use
Forget 2-word keywords. In generative engines, people ask in natural language. Your job is to build a list of 15 to 25 real questions a buyer would ask.
Three mandatory types of prompts:
- Category prompts — no brand name. Example: "What are the best B2B AI SDR tools for mid-market companies?"
- Comparison prompts — your industry or direct competitors. Example: "Compare Drift vs Intercom vs cheaper alternatives for SMBs."
- Problem prompts — how your customer talks when they do not know you exist yet. Example: "My sales team wastes time qualifying cold leads, what solutions exist?"
Practical rule: if you have talked to 20 customers, the real questions are already in those conversations. Review emails, demo transcripts, and common objections.
Step 2. Run the prompts in clean sessions
This is critical and almost no one does it right. If you test from your regular account, AIs return answers contaminated by your history. You will see what you want to see, not what a new customer sees.
How to do it right:
- Open an incognito window in your browser.
- Log out of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot.
- Run each prompt and capture the full response (screenshot or exact copy).
- Repeat each prompt 3 times in different sessions. Responses vary, and one alone is not enough.
Minimum platforms to audit: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini. Add Claude and Copilot if your industry is tech.
Step 3. Classify each response in the visibility matrix
Each response falls into one of these four states:
Set up a spreadsheet with three columns: prompt, platform, state. In 30 minutes you have an honest picture of where you stand.
Step 4. Analyze the competitors that do appear
For each prompt where you come out badly, answer three questions:
- Which 3 to 5 companies are being cited? Write them down.
- What do they have that you do not? Review their website: do they have comparisons, HTML FAQ, conversational content, llms.txt configured?
- Where is the AI finding them? Often the AI cites brands because they appear on G2 reviews, Reddit, industry media comparisons, or Wikipedia. External presence weighs more than owned content.
This step is what turns the audit into an action plan. If competitors appear on G2 and you do not have a profile, you already have your next task.
Step 5. Measure real AI traffic in GA4
Even if your brand does not appear cited, you might be getting residual traffic from AIs. Check in Google Analytics 4:
- Go to Acquisition → Traffic acquisition.
- Filter by source containing: chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com.
- Compare the last 90 days against the previous quarter.
If AI traffic is under 1% of your organic, you have a generative visibility problem. If it is above 5% and you have not worked on GEO explicitly, you have a ready-to-scale opportunity.
How to score the audit result
To make the audit actionable, assign a GEO visibility score out of 100:
- 0-25: Invisible. Neither you nor your category appears. You start from zero.
- 26-50: Critical. Competitors capture 100% of mentions. Direct business risk.
- 51-75: Improvable. You appear sometimes, but competitors dominate.
- 76-100: Competitive. You appear consistently. The work is to maintain and expand.
Quick formula: (cited or mentioned responses / total prompts tested) × 100.
Most B2B companies we audit score between 15 and 40. It is not a disaster — it is the starting point of almost the entire Western market.
The 5 mistakes that invalidate a GEO audit
- Auditing from your regular account. Responses are biased by your history. Always incognito, always logged out.
- Running each prompt only once. Responses vary. Minimum 3 repetitions per prompt and platform.
- Using keywords instead of questions. GEO does not work with "B2B CRM." It works with "what CRM do you recommend for a 10-person startup?".
- Auditing only one platform. ChatGPT and Perplexity give radically different results. Auditing only one is seeing half the map.
- Not documenting responses. Without screenshots or copies, there is no way to measure improvements in 60 days.
What to do if you do not appear in any AI
Good news: the GEO market is young. Competition is beatable and results come in 3 to 6 months of consistent work.
Bad news: no isolated action works. Showing up in ChatGPT requires working five vectors at once:
- Citable content — direct-answer formats, explicit definitions, concrete data.
- External authority — presence on G2, Trustpilot, industry media, Reddit when applicable.
- Technical foundation — schema markup, properly configured llms.txt, not blocking GPTBot or PerplexityBot.
- Entities — brand consistency on Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, industry directories.
- Classic SEO — because 82% of Gemini citations come from pages with good traditional SEO.
This is what we at Solumize call AI Search Optimization: an ongoing service combining SEO + AEO + GEO + digital reputation + content, designed for B2B companies that do not show up where their customers are already searching.
→ Request your free GEO audit at solumize.com/contact-us
Last updated: April 2026.
