Your GEO score is probably between 30 and 45.

If you haven't run a GEO audit on your site yet, here's a reasonable prediction: you score somewhere between 32 and 48 out of 100. Not because your site is bad. Because GEO optimization is new, most sites haven't done any of it, and the gap between "typical unoptimized site" and "minimal viable GEO baseline" turns out to be small enough to close in a few days of focused work.

The GEO score is how AI Rank Score measures AI engine visibility — a number from 0 to 100 built from four modules, each reflecting a different dimension of what makes AI engines reach for your content. Understanding what goes into each module is the fastest way to understand what's worth fixing first.

How the score works

AI Readiness (20 points): Can AI crawlers find you and understand what you are?

This module covers llms.txt presence, whether AI crawlers are explicitly allowed in robots.txt, FAQPage schema, Article schema with dates, Open Graph tags, sitemap, HTTPS, and content word count. It's the most directly technical module.

Most sites score 8–13 here. The two most common gaps: AI crawlers blocked by a forgotten robots.txt rule (surprisingly common — roughly 80% of major news publishers block at least one AI crawler, and many SaaS sites have the same problem without realizing it), and missing FAQPage schema. Both are fixable in under two hours.

Content Authority (25 points): Is your content actually citable?

This module uses Claude Sonnet to evaluate your page's content the same way AI search engines would — measuring factual density, E-E-A-T signals, structural clarity, author attribution, external citations, and the presence of specific, verifiable claims.

Most sites score 10–16 here. The biggest gap: article content that makes assertions without data support. The fix isn't complicated — adding one verifiable, sourced statistic per 200 words typically moves this score significantly. It also requires actually writing better, which is the harder but more durable part.

Domain Authority (15 points): Do AI engines trust your domain?

Three signals: domain age, HTTPS, and Wikipedia presence. Most sites score 7–11 here depending on age. Wikipedia presence is the highest-point opportunity that's actually actionable — a brand mention on any relevant Wikipedia page is worth 5 points and carries disproportionate weight in ChatGPT's training data.

This is the slowest-moving module. Focus energy on the other three first.

AI Citation Testing (40 points): Do AI engines actually cite you?

This is the module that matters most — 40 points based entirely on real AI behavior. We generate 10 industry-relevant prompts and test them live across AI engines. Each prompt that produces a citation with your brand name scores 4 points.

Most unoptimized sites score 4–12 here (1–3 citations out of 10 prompts). Moving this score requires the other three modules to be working — you need to be technically accessible, have citable content, and have enough domain trust for AI engines to feel confident citing you. But distribution also matters: being listed on ProductHunt, G2, and Reddit in relevant contexts creates citation surfaces that compound over time.

The score distribution (real benchmark data)

The C-tier (40–59) is where most sites land after doing the obvious technical fixes but before building citation presence. Moving from C to B requires content investment and distribution work that takes 4–8 weeks. Moving from B to A requires the compounding factors — domain authority, third-party coverage, Wikipedia presence — that build over months.

What moves the score most per hour

The first three items take about 5 hours total and should move most sites from the 32–45 range to the 48–60 range. That covers the obvious technical gaps. The next tier — content improvements and third-party distribution — is where the real work happens, but also where the sustained citation gains come from.

Why the Citation Testing module is 40% of the score

It's weighted highest because it's the only module that measures actual AI behavior rather than signals that correlate with AI behavior. You can have perfect AI Readiness, excellent Content Authority, and strong Domain Authority — and still have a 0% citation rate if AI engines simply aren't reaching for your content in practice.

The Citation Testing module is the ground truth. The other three modules explain why your citation rate is what it is, but the citation rate itself is the outcome we're optimizing for.

This is also why updating other modules without testing the citation impact is incomplete optimization. Run the audit. Fix the obvious technical gaps. Run it again in 30 days. The score change tells you whether the work is landing.

Free audit, 30 seconds, no signup: AI Rank Score.

A note on volatility

GEO scores have more natural variance than SEO metrics. AI engines update their retrieval patterns, new content changes citation dynamics, and the same set of prompts can return different results across different times of day. Monthly auditing — rather than weekly — gives a more reliable signal.

The trend over 3–6 months is far more meaningful than any single data point. What you're tracking is directional: is your citation rate improving? Are the technical signals getting stronger? Is the content becoming more specifically citable?

Those are the questions worth asking each month. Start with where you are today.

Sources: AI Rank Score audit data across thousands of sites · Princeton / KDD GEO Research Paper, 2024 · Frase.io Schema Report, 2025 · Incremys GEO Statistics, 2026