// Checklist
Score your GEO readiness in 30 questions.
A self-scored checklist for teams who want to know — honestly — whether their site is set up to be cited inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, and Gemini. Print it, fill it in, ship the gaps.
Free under CC BY 4.0. Designed to be printed, marked up by hand, and re-run every quarter.
// How to use this
How to use this.
Search didn’t die. It became invisible. Most of the buying journey now happens inside an answer engine you can’t see, and most sites have no instrumentation for it. This checklist is the first honest measurement: thirty binary questions, no wiggle room. It takes about fifteen minutes. If you can’t answer one cleanly, count it as a no — aspirational, not contractual. The point is the gap list you walk away with.
Each question maps to a concrete, ship-it-this-sprint change. There’s no philosophy section, no maturity model, no five-stage framework. You either have an llms.txt or you don’t. You either declare canonical URLs or you don’t. The engines treat your site the same way: yes/no on every signal, then a ranked judgment based on the count. Score yourself the way they score you.
- Read each item; check ☐ if it’s true of your site today.
- Score yourself out of 30 at the bottom.
- Anything unchecked is a gap. Prioritize the highest-impact ones first.
- Re-run quarterly — engine behavior changes.
// The checklist
The 30 questions.
Six categories, five questions each. Don’t skip categories you think you’ve already nailed — the scoring is more useful when it’s honest than when it’s flattering. Crawlability comes first because nothing else matters if the bots can’t reach you. Measurement comes last because there’s no point measuring a system you haven’t built yet.
Crawlability (5)
Schema (5)
AI-readability artifacts (5)
Entity clarity (5)
Content shape (5)
Note on content shape: quantity isn’t the bar — one excellent definitional page beats forty mediocre blog posts. Engines reward authority on specific entity-claim pairs, not throughput. If you only ever ship one piece of original research, ship one that’s irreducible.
Measurement (5)
Add it up. The number you land on is your honest baseline. The number you want is higher than the one you have. Write today’s score in the margin and date it — the only way to know whether the program is working is to compare against a number from ninety days ago.
// Scoring
What your score means.
The bands are blunt on purpose. A score isn’t a grade — it’s a description of where the engines currently find you, and how much surface area you’ve given them to work with. Most teams who run this for the first time score lower than they expected. That’s the point. The number is useful precisely because it’s embarrassing.
- 0–10: You’re invisible to answer engines. Most sites are here. Your competitors are too — whoever moves first wins the category.
- 11–18: Foundational work in place, but real depth still missing. Citations happen sporadically. Schema and entity gaps are usually the bottleneck.
- 19–25: Solid GEO. You’re being cited; tighten and scale. Focus shifts from shipping artifacts to defending share against challengers.
- 26–30: Best-in-class. You’re the brand others reference. Now defend it — engines update their rankings constantly, and the gap closes faster than it opened.
One number isn’t enough on its own. Score each category separately too — a five-out-of-five on Crawlability paired with a zero on Measurement is a very different problem than the inverse, and the fix order matters. Crawlability and Schema are deploy-and-forget. Entity clarity is editorial work. Measurement is the only category that genuinely benefits from tooling rather than a single shipping sprint.
// Fixes
How to fix the biggest gaps fast.
Each category has a cheap, fast first move. You don’t need a roadmap to start — you need the next ticket. Pick the lowest-scoring category, ship one item, re-score the category. Repeat until the band moves.
- Crawlability gaps — read the llms.txt explainer and use our robots.txt as a reference template. Most fixes are a single deploy.
- Schema gaps — the docs hub has the exact JSON-LD blocks we use. Validate every change against the Schema.org validator before shipping.
- Entity-clarity gaps — the glossary is the canonical definition surface; the share-of-voice entry shows the level of disambiguation engines expect.
- Content gaps — the answers hub demonstrates the question-as-URL pattern, and the prompt corpus shows which queries your category is actually losing on.
- Measurement gaps — this is the actual thing Vizelo does for you. Start free to see your first share-of-voice report in under a minute.
A note on sequencing. Most teams want to start with content because content is the most visible thing they own. Resist that instinct. If your crawlability score is below three, no amount of new content will reach the engines that matter. Fix the plumbing first, then the schema, then the artifacts, then write. The order is unglamorous but it’s the only one that compounds.
FAQ
Common questions.
How long until my score moves?
Months, and it varies by engine. Crawlability and schema fixes can show up in Perplexity within days; AI Overviews and ChatGPT often take 4–8 weeks to reflect changes. Re-score quarterly.
Is this checklist Vizelo-specific?
No. Every item points to an open standard, a public schema, or a measurable property of your own site. You can run the checklist on any site whether or not you ever talk to us.
Can my agency use this for clients?
Yes. The checklist is published under CC BY 4.0 — use it, fork it, rebrand the printable, score your clients. Attribution to Vizelo.ai is appreciated but the license only requires it where you redistribute the text itself.
Does Vizelo audit my site automatically?
Yes. After signup the same 30 checks run inside our pipeline against your live site, plus the off-site ones we can’t grade from a printable — entity completeness on Wikidata, citation share per engine, sentiment, and the rest. You get the score, the gaps, and the prioritized fixes.