TL;DR — AI assistants are starting to answer the questions people used to type into Google — and they only quote a handful of sources. We wanted to know whether ours was one of them, so we built GEOScan: a tool that checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI can actually read and cite a site. Then we ran it on ourselves.
From ranking to being quoted
Classic SEO is about ranking in a list of links. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is narrower and harder: being the source an AI quotes when it writes the answer. The mechanics are different — a model has to parse your page without running JavaScript, trust who wrote it, and find it fresh enough to surface. You can rank well and still be invisible to the AI layer now sitting on top of search.
So we built a scanner
GEOScan takes a URL and runs about 25 deterministic checks — no AI in the loop, just the signals a crawler actually reads — across five areas:
- Technical — permanent redirects, AI crawlers allowed, a readable sitemap, and real content in the raw HTML.
- Structured data — Organization, Person, Article and FAQ schema, checked in the static HTML.
- Content — substance, question-form headings, a summary up top, extractable lists and tables.
- Entity & authority — author bylines, an About page, machine-readable dates, external profiles.
- Freshness — how recently you’ve genuinely published.
We pointed it at ourselves first
Dogfooding is the honest way to build a tool like this. yameveo.ai scored well — but the scanner still caught things, including a temporary (302) redirect we’d left in place and an article missing its author byline. Some of it we knew; some of it we didn’t. That’s the point: the checks are boring, deterministic, and they don’t care how good you think your site is.
The one that’s easy to miss
The most instructive finding came from testing other sites. A major news site we scanned injects its Article schema with JavaScript. In a browser it looks perfect — but most AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript, so to them that structured data simply isn’t there. GEO isn’t about what your site looks like to you; it’s about what a machine sees when JavaScript never runs.
Try it on your site
GEOScan is an early-stage POC — the method is the same one we used to rebuild this site to be citable. If you want to know your own GEO score, you can request a free scan. It’s part of Yameveo Labs, and we’ll be building it in the open.