# What is a GEO audit (or AEO audit), and do I need one?

> A GEO or AEO audit checks how AI assistants describe and recommend your business. What one should cover, your options, and Preferly's $99 one-time audit.

Canonical: https://www.preferly.ai/geo-audit

A GEO (generative engine optimization) or AEO (answer engine optimization) audit checks how AI assistants describe and recommend your business, and what to fix. GEO and AEO are two names for the same work. Preferly’s AI visibility audit is one: $99 once, 10 leading AI models, and every contradiction quoted against your own website.

## What a GEO or AEO audit should cover

- **Customer questions that don’t name you,** asked across several AI models, with web search on.
- **Whether you’re named, and where.** Your place in each answer, and who is named instead.
- **Accuracy.** What AI says about your hours, prices, services and location, checked against your website.
- **Sources.** Which sites AI cites, and whether your own site is one of them.
- **Crawler access.** Robots.txt rules for AI crawlers, bot checks, and whether your facts are readable without JavaScript.
- **Structured data.** Whether your pages state your business facts in a form any crawler can read.
- **A fix list in priority order,** specific enough to act on.

## Your options, and what you pay

- **A one-time audit.** You pay once, get a dated snapshot and a fix list, and make the changes yourself or hand them to your web person.
- **A subscription tracker.** A monthly fee to re-ask AI on a schedule and chart the results. Useful for marketing teams who report on trends; more than most small businesses need to start.
- **An agency audit.** A person reviews your site and AI answers, usually priced by quote, and often leads to ongoing work.

## What you get from Preferly

- $99 once, no subscription and no sales call.
- 10 leading AI models: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude Opus, Grok, Meta Muse Spark, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, NVIDIA Nemotron and GLM.
- Every competitor AI recommends instead of you, by name, with the sites AI cited for them.
- Every claim AI made about you checked against your website, with what AI said quoted beside the line on your site that disagrees.
- Robots.txt rules for 10+ AI crawlers, bot checks and readability.
- Every fix in priority order, with paste-ready code, plus an AI Fix Pack to paste into your own AI assistant. See what the fixes look like.
- Ready in about 5 minutes, with one free re-scan within 30 days.

Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot aren’t covered yet. See an example report before you pay.

## The do-it-yourself version

1. Check that AI crawlers can reach your site with the free crawler check.
2. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude three or four questions a new customer would ask, without your name, and note who they name.
3. Ask about your business by name and compare the answer with your website.
4. Fix your facts in text and structured data. Does schema markup help my business show up in AI answers?
5. Ask the same questions again in a few weeks.

## Questions

### Is an AEO audit the same as a GEO audit?

Yes, in practice. GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization) are two names for making your business easy for AI assistants to find, describe correctly and recommend. An audit under either name should check the same things.

### What is an AI SEO audit?

Another name for the same check, sometimes also called an AI search visibility audit. Some agencies use it for a regular SEO audit with an AI section added, so ask whether it asks AI models real customer questions.

### Do I need one?

If customers might ask ChatGPT or Gemini for a business like yours, it’s worth knowing what they hear. Start with the free check: 3 AI models, 5 customer questions, about a minute. If it shows gaps, the full audit lists every fix.

### Is Preferly’s audit a subscription?

No. You pay $99 once and nothing renews. It includes one free re-scan within 30 days to see what changed after your fixes.

### What if the audit isn’t useful?

If your report finds no fixes, email us within 7 days and we'll give you a full refund.

## Related

- What is the best AI visibility audit tool to see how language models rank my brand?
- Can you recommend an AI visibility audit tool that provides code fixes to improve my rankings?
- Which AI visibility audit tools track competitor recommendations?
- How can I check if AI chatbots are recommending my competitors instead of my company?
- How do I know if AI web crawlers are blocked from accessing my site and spreading false information about my products?
- Is there a free AI visibility checker for my business?
- What is an AI visibility score, and what’s a good one?
- What is generative engine optimization (GEO), and does my business need it?
- Does schema markup help my business show up in AI answers?
- Pricing: the free check and the full report