GEO Audits: The Next Big Thing After SEO?

Every few years, the way people search for information changes dramatically. First it was content marketing, then technical SEO, and more recently, the rise of zero-click searches. Now, a new wave is building: GEO Audits. If you care about how your brand or project is discovered, especially as more users turn to AI assistants for answers, this is a trend worth watching.

What is a GEO Audit?

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. While SEO is about ranking your site on Google, GEO focuses on ensuring your brand appears inside answers generated by AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

A GEO Audit is a process that checks how often your business, product, or website actually shows up in these AI-generated responses, either as a mention or a cited source. The rules are different: with Google, you might still get clicks from position seven or eight. In generative search, only a small handful of brands, sometimes just two or three, are surfaced in the AI's final summary. The rest simply don't appear.

Why Are GEO Audits Gaining Attention?

The search landscape is shifting fast. Analysts predict AI assistants could soon answer as many queries as Google itself. More people are relying on chatbots for direct answers, and often never see a list of traditional web links.

What's surprising to many founders and marketers is that brands that rank highly in Google may be completely absent from ChatGPT answers. AI models tend to recommend only the most authoritative brands for a given question. As a result, "winner-takes-all" is even more true in GEO than in classic SEO. This is why more startups are starting to invest in GEO Audits, measuring how often they're cited, linked, or named by these new AI engines.

How to Run a GEO Audit

You don't need a technical background to get started. The basics are simple:

1. Identify a list of keywords or questions your audience might ask an AI assistant.

2. Run those queries through tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

3. Track whether your brand, website, or product is mentioned or cited as a source.

4. Compare your results against your competitors.

There are already platforms making this easier, such as Sellm. You can see an example of a GEO Audit, as well as a detailed Geo Audit post that breaks down the process and what to look for.

What GEO Audits Are Showing

The findings so far are clear: AI-powered search is much stricter about which brands get surfaced. Content that is loosely related, broad, or just designed for extra traffic rarely makes it into AI-generated answers. Instead, brands that are laser-focused on their area of expertise and clearly authoritative on specific topics are the ones that get cited. The old SEO strategy of casting a wide net is becoming less effective as search moves into the AI era.

GEO audits are also revealing new opportunities. For example, marketers are starting to rethink their approach in fields like Vibe Marketing, aligning their content more closely with the way AI assistants evaluate and cite sources.

Why Indie Hackers Should Care

If your project relies on organic discovery for growth, now is the time to start tracking your visibility inside AI-generated answers. GEO Audits are quickly becoming a must for anyone serious about search visibility over the next decade.

You don't need to change your entire strategy overnight. But this is the right moment to ask: does ChatGPT mention your brand or product when users ask about your category? If not, what's missing? The projects and businesses that appear in AI answers now are likely to have a big advantage as this trend accelerates.

If you want to learn more or see how your project performs in AI search, check out what a GEO Audit involves and consider running one for your own site.

Have you explored your GEO presence yet? Curious to hear what others are seeing, share your experience below.