The GEO Checklist: 27 Best Practices for AI Visibility in 2026

A solid GEO checklist should have 5 sections with 27 items in total. Run the entire list of 27 items on a quarterly basis on your top pages. Run the Measurement section of the GEO checklist on a monthly basis.

This is the condensed, checkable version of everything in our full guide to how to do GEO. Use that guide for the reasoning behind each item; use this one when you're actually working through a page.

On-page structure (8 items)

• Page opens with a direct, self-contained answer to its core question, 40 to 80 words, before any context-setting.
• Major sections sit under question-format H2s ("What does X cost?" not "Pricing")
• Each section is self-contained enough to be quoted out of context
• Paragraphs are generally between 60 and 100 words long.
• Render comparisons and steps as tables or lists.
• All content is written in plain language so that no special interpretation is required beyond simple word lifting.
• At least one FAQ block per page. And the questions have to be real questions that people are asking.
• Author byline with real credentials on anything claiming expertise.

Entity clarity (5 items)

• Brand name, one-line description, and category match exactly across your site, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and review platforms.
• Homepage clearly states the company’s purpose, target customer, and pricing in one sentence for a model to copy.
• Organization and Article schema implemented and validated
• A founder or team page that includes pictures and names of the real people behind the company and not a grid of logos.
• The robots.txt file needs to allow search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) whereas training bots (GPTBot) might be restricted. You can test this with a direct fetch (e.g. curl -s -D - http://example.com/). This should return real HTML content for your key pages (as opposed to an empty JavaScript shell).

Off-site authority (7 items)

• Your brand has been included in a list of “best X” already cited by AI for your market.
• Genuine (non promotional) presence in all relevant SubReddits that your customers participate in.
• Review Platform Profile - Your brand should have a live and current profile on the leading review platform for your specific category (G2, Capterra, TrustPilot, etc.)
• A page comparing yourself with competitors or other alternatives to your product or service (either your own or someone else’s)
• One piece of earned media or guest contribution in the last two quarters.
• Transcribe any and all podcast / video appearances so they can be referenced as well as your articles.
• Original data / Customer survey (published at least once per quarter) because, according to Princeton GEO research, attributed statistics is highest-lift GEO tactic.

Content operations (4 items)

• All your top pages are updated on a quarterly basis and have a date visible on the page.
• A tracked backlog of prompt gaps, questions your competitors answer and you don't.
• Monthly competitor citation check: which prompts name them and not you, and why.
• One new cluster page per month connecting to your pillar pages in order to grow topical authority.

Measurement (3 items)

• A fixed list of 15 to 20 buying-intent prompts that you run every month identically across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini and look at the referrals from those pages ( chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com ) as a separate channel in your analytics.
• AI referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com tracked as a channel in your analytics.
• Every month, run a share-of-voice review of all the tracked prompts to see the trend of how percentage of tracked prompts name you over time.

How to use this

Rather than trying to complete the entire checklist in one falling swoop, start with the pages on your site that are most valuable to you. Then go through the On-page and the Entity sections for those pages (you can complete those in a matter of minutes and see the changes start to appear immediately). The section on Off-site will take longer as it targets visibility in recommendation prompts and, in general, this takes longer to change than on-page content. For the Content Ops and Measurement sections, which are on-going, set up a recurring calendar event for the month to complete the runs of prompts and track the results.

Running the checklist automatically

The GEO section of the checklist is run daily by the GEO agent as part of the Okara team’s work. The GEO section is comprised of the entity section and the measurement section. The entity section is designed to list out all of the information necessary to track a company’s presence in AI, across various platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. The measurement section of the GEO section is used to track and measure that presence. The results of the GEO section are then used in conjunction with the on-page section and the content operations section of the checklist to inform and drive the work of the SEO and coding agents and the writer agent. The Reddit agent is used to work the off-site section of the checklist. The agent finds threads on relevant subreddits and then writes and posts replies on behalf of the user. For the Reddit agent to work effectively, the user must add their site to okara.ai and then the first pass of the checklist will be completed in minutes.

FAQ

How often should I run a GEO audit? A full GEO audit with a 27 point checklist for your top pages (every 3 months) and then a measurement section of the prompt tracking, AI referral traffic and share of voice section on a monthly basis. The latter section will track the changes of the AI answers on a monthly basis, as they change very fast.

What's the single highest-impact item on this list? The answer-first opening under item one. It’s fully within your control, costs nothing to fix, and structural answer capsules are among the strongest known predictors of AI citation.

Do I need to hit all 27 items to see results? While you may see some indexing and clearer AI descriptions of your brand in the weeks following the on-page and entity sections, the off-site section of the checklist is what moves the recommendation-prompt visibility for your site. It is a slower process but will begin to compound results for you over time.

Is this checklist different for ecommerce or local business? These 27 things will work for ecommerce, local businesses, etc. — Ecommerce items noted below (Product schema and Review counts are items that would add weight in the off-site section for an ecommerce focused site). Local businesses would add consistent NAP (name, address, phone) data as well as ensuring that your Google Business Profile is up to date and accurate.