What we’re checking
GEO readiness is about whether a generative search system has enough clean context to identify the entity, understand the page, find evidence and reuse a passage without guessing what it means.
What the audit actually reads
The score combines indexability, crawler access, entity signals, structured data, trust, evidence and extractability. It is deliberately separate from real-world AI visibility, which has to be measured with live prompts over time.
What I would change
Fix ambiguity before chasing mentions. Make the entity obvious, put evidence next to claims that need it, keep important passages self-contained and remove retrieval blockers that would stop a system from seeing the page in the first place.
- Check the page type first. A homepage, article and product page do not need identical patterns.
- Fix the underlying page or markup; do not add something only because the checker can count it.
- Keep what visitors see and what structured data says in agreement.
- After deployment, compare the evidence from the old and new audit before celebrating a higher score.
How to check your work
Re-run the audit, then test real prompts in the products you care about. A stronger readiness score is useful; an actual citation or mention is a different measurement.
Where this usually goes wrong
- The team fixes the number but leaves the user experience unchanged.
- A plugin adds markup or repeated copy that the visible page cannot honestly support.
- One directive is changed without checking the redirects, canonical, sitemap or indexing policy around it.
- A readiness score is presented as proof of ranking or AI visibility. It is not.