GEO / AEO audit
GEO and AI visibility audit
Find out how Google and AI answer engines see your business, who they recommend instead of you, and what to fix first.
What is a GEO and AI visibility audit?
A GEO and AI visibility audit is a fixed-scope review of how your business appears in Google search and in AI-generated answers, and what is stopping it from appearing more. Hitfire Digital’s audit tests the five things that decide whether AI platforms cite a page: passage quality, meaning whether a section gives a self-contained answer; structural clarity, meaning headings and HTML that machines can parse; authority signals, meaning whether your domain and authors are treated as credible; technical accessibility, meaning whether AI crawlers can reach and read the page; and brand presence, meaning whether your brand is mentioned on the platforms AI systems draw from. Each finding is backed by evidence from your own site, your search data and live AI answers, so you can see the problem rather than take it on trust.
Scope
What does the audit cover?
Six checks, each with evidence from your own site and live AI answers.
- AI visibility check. How ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews describe and cite your brand for your priority queries.
- Competitor comparison. Who gets named instead of you, and why.
- Technical SEO crawl. Indexation, crawl waste, Core Web Vitals, JavaScript rendering, and AI crawler access.
- Schema and entity review. Whether search engines and AI models can tell clearly who you are and what you do.
- Content answerability. Whether your key pages give clean, quotable answers.
- Prioritised action plan. Every fix ranked by impact and effort.
How is this different from a standard SEO audit?
A standard SEO audit asks whether Google can crawl, index, and rank your pages. Hitfire Digital’s visibility audit asks that too, drawing on our technical SEO service, then checks the layers a standard audit usually skips. It tests whether AI search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot are allowed in robots.txt and not blocked by a CDN or firewall, which many sites do by accident. It checks whether key content is in the server-rendered HTML, because AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. It reviews whether your pages answer questions directly or bury the answer under introductions. And it compares what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews actually say about your brand with what is true, because inconsistent facts across your site, profiles, and directories get repeated in AI answers. Fixing those is the work of our GEO and AEO service.
What do you get at the end of the audit?
Hitfire Digital delivers the audit as a written report and a working baseline.
- A dated baseline across three channels- traditional search, AI answers, and answer features- that can be re-run later to show progress
- Every finding ranked by impact and effort, with the evidence for each
- Specific fixes for crawler access, page structure, content, and brand facts
- A list of the questions where competitors are cited instead of you
- A walkthrough of the findings, so your team knows where to start
Who is the audit for?
The audit suits businesses that rank reasonably well in Google but rarely appear in AI answers, or that see competitors named in ChatGPT and AI Overviews for the questions their own customers ask. It is also a sensible first step before a redesign, migration or content programme, because it shows which problems to fix first. Hitfire Digital runs it for in-house marketing teams, founders and agencies who want an independent view of their search and AI visibility, backed by evidence rather than opinion.
Results
How did client sites perform through the March 2025 core update?
Hitfire Digital’s client sites came through the March 2025 Google core update with conversions up on all four. Core updates are where weak SEO gets found out, so they are a fair test of the work.
| Client | Organic traffic | Visibility | Conversions |
|---|---|---|---|
| PPE supplier | +9.6% | +13.8% | +692.76% |
| Luxury alcoholic brand Seasonal dip, mostly in informational queries, while commercial traffic held. | -10% | +9.86% | +20.25% |
| Luxury furniture brand | +16.73% | +26.72% | +17.97% |
| Luxury wallpaper brand Visibility dropped because the strategy shifted to keywords that actually drove conversions. | +12% | -8% | +55.21% |
The common thread: consistent lead generation, revenue growth, and SEO that adapts to algorithm updates instead of reacting to them.
Audit questions
Do I need to give you access to anything?
Read access to Google Search Console and GA4 makes the audit sharper. The AI visibility and technical checks can start without it, using your public site and live AI answers.
How many questions does the audit test?
The audit uses 10 to 20 priority questions: a mix of commercial queries for what you sell, informational questions your customers ask, and two or three branded queries.
Will the audit show why competitors are cited instead of us?
Yes. For each priority question, the audit records which sources AI platforms cite and compares their pages with yours, so the gap is specific: structure, evidence, authority or access.
What happens after the audit?
You can implement the plan in-house, or Hitfire Digital can implement it with you. Either way, the baseline makes it possible to show what changed at 28 and 90 days.
Request your audit
Send your website address and the searches that matter most to your business. We will reply with next steps.
Prefer email? Write to [email protected].