The Six Dimensions of GEO Readiness (and How to Read Your Score)

Six Numbers, One Score

Run Active GEO on your site and you get one overall score. Underneath it sit six separate numbers.

Each one tracks a different thing an AI system checks before it decides to cite you. A weak score on one dimension can pull the whole report down even when the other five look strong.

Here is what each dimension means, and the first move to make on each.

Entity Clarity

Entity clarity measures whether an AI system can state, in one sentence, who you are and what you do.

Vague homepage copy fails this test even when it reads well. “Innovative solutions for the modern enterprise” gives a model nothing concrete to repeat back.

First move: rewrite your homepage’s opening line so it names your company, your category, and one specific thing you do. A model should be able to quote it directly.

Structured Data

Structured data is markup that states facts about your business directly, instead of making an AI system infer them from paragraphs.

Organization schema, FAQ schema, and Article schema each give a crawler a machine-readable answer instead of a guess.

First move: add Organization schema to your homepage. Google’s Rich Results Test checks it in under a minute.

AI Crawler Access

None of this works if the crawler cannot reach your site. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot all need to be allowed in robots.txt.

Many sites block them by accident, often through a security default nobody reviewed. We cover how to check this in a separate note.

First move: open yoursite.com/robots.txt and check for a Disallow rule that catches AI crawlers along with everything else.

Citability Signals

Citability signals are the traits that make a passage easy for an AI system to quote directly: named sources, real numbers, direct quotes.

Researchers from Princeton and Georgia Tech tested nine content strategies against a real citation benchmark. The ones that worked all shared one trait: they were specific and attributed, not persuasive.

First move: find one unattributed claim on your site and attach a real source, date, or number to it.

Answer-Ready Content

Answer-ready content is written so one section fully answers one question, without asking a reader, or a model, to piece the answer together across the page.

AI systems summarize you before they cite you. A page built around direct questions survives that summary. A page built around a sales narrative gets flattened in the process.

First move: pick your most common sales question and give it its own heading, answered in the first sentence underneath.

Brand Consistency

Brand consistency checks whether your name, description, and key facts match everywhere an AI system might find them: your site, LinkedIn, directories, press.

A model that finds three conflicting descriptions of your company trusts none of them fully.

First move: compare your homepage’s one-line description against your LinkedIn company page. Fix whichever one is out of date.

Where the Guide Comes In

Six dimensions, six starting points. Fixing all of them is not the work of one afternoon.

We wrote a longer, practitioner-level guide with the full best-practices list for every dimension above. It is free, and it is the same standard we hold our own advisory work to.

Sources: Aggarwal, P. et al. “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization.” KDD 2024. arXiv:2311.09735. Authors are affiliated with Princeton, Georgia Tech, IIT Delhi, and the Allen Institute for AI.