Minute 1-3: Do they already mention you?
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini (with search enabled) and ask the same thing on all three: "who offers [your service] in [your city]?". Note whether they mention you, in what position, and which source they cite when they do.
If you don't appear on any of them: it's not necessarily a technical problem with your site — you may simply not be present in the sources these engines consult. Continue with the rest of the checklist to find out which is your case.
Minute 4-6: Technical markup
Without leaving your browser, right-click on your homepage → "View page source" and search (Ctrl/Cmd+F) for:
application/ld+json— if it doesn't appear, you don't have Schema.org markup. It's the fastest technical improvement to apply.FAQPage— if you have FAQs but they aren't marked up as such, you're leaving easy wins on the table.
Then try loading yourdomain.com/llms.txt. If it returns a 404, you don't have this file — it's cheap to create and several engines already consult it.
Minute 7-9: Content format
Open your services page or your most recent blog post and check:
- Are there explicit questions followed by short, self-contained answers (2-4 sentences)? That's the format most likely to be quoted verbatim.
- Or is it all one long block of text with no clear subheadings? That's much harder for a model to extract.
Minute 10-12: External presence
Search your company name on Google in quotes. Count how many results are NOT your own site: industry directories, press, reviews. If the only result is you yourself, that's your main bottleneck — no engine will cite you as a trusted external source if you don't exist outside your own website.
Minute 13-15: Freshness
Check the date of the most recent content on your site. Perplexity, in particular, strongly favours content published or updated in the last 30 days. If your last post or update is more than 2-3 months old, you're losing that momentum.
Result: how many of the 5 steps did you pass?
| Score | What it means |
|---|---|
| 0-1 of 5 | Starting point. Begin with technical markup (step 2), it's the fastest to fix. |
| 2-3 of 5 | Technical base is there, missing external presence (step 4) — the most common bottleneck. |
| 4-5 of 5 | Good starting point. Now it's about sustaining publishing cadence and adding reviews. |
Conclusion
This audit doesn't replace a full GEO workflow, but it gives you an honest snapshot of where you stand in 15 minutes. To dig deeper into the differences between engines, check out our article on how each one decides what to cite. And if you want to see it applied in practice, we cover the full process in our own case study.