The GEO Pre-Flight Checklist

GEO work without a baseline is faith-based marketing. Before we start any engagement — and before you start one with anyone — this is the setup that makes results measurable instead of arguable. Budget an afternoon; every step is doable in-house.

Part 1 — Baselines

1. Freeze your analytics baseline. Export the last 90 days: sessions, revenue, and conversion rate by channel. You cannot measure a lift you never recorded. Store the export somewhere it won't be "cleaned up."

2. Set up AI-referral tracking. Create a saved segment or channel group for AI referrers (chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com, claude.ai). Most stores discover they already have AI-referred sessions — they were just filed under generic referral traffic.

3. Record current branded search volume. Search Console, last 90 days, queries containing your brand name. Answer-driven discovery often shows up first as branded-search growth, because people hear the name in an answer and then go looking for it.

Part 2 — The query set

4. Define your category query set. Write down 30–50 questions a real buyer would ask an assistant on the way to buying what you sell — consideration questions ("best X for Y"), comparison questions ("X vs Y"), and validation questions ("is X worth it?"). This set is the scoreboard for everything that follows; don't delegate it to a keyword tool.

5. Run the manual answer audit. Ask the major assistants each question in your set. Record every brand named and every source cited. Yes, manually — you learn more from twenty real answers than from any dashboard. This is your day-zero share of answer.

6. Map the citation sources. From the audit, list the third-party surfaces that keep appearing as sources in your category's answers — review sites, forums, publications, directories. This list is where corroboration work will happen; categories differ wildly.

Part 3 — Inventories

7. Inventory your review presence. Every platform holding reviews of your brand: count, average rating, date of the most recent review. Stale reviews read as a stale brand — to humans and to engines.

8. Inventory third-party mentions. Search your brand name and note every independent site that mentions you in a category context. Under three? Corroboration is your biggest gap, and no amount of on-site work will out-earn it.

9. Audit your claims. List every performance or quality claim on your site. Mark which ones link to something checkable. Engines cross-reference; unverifiable claims are dead weight at best and a credibility discount at worst.

Part 4 — Technical readiness

10. Validate your structured data. Run key templates (home, product, collection) through a schema validator. Broken or missing Organization/Product markup is the most common — and most fixable — reason engines can't parse a store.

11. Check crawler access. Confirm robots.txt doesn't block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or CCBot. Some platforms and CDN "bot protection" presets block them by default — silently exiling you from every future answer.

12. View-source your money pages. Load your top product pages and view raw source. If the content isn't in the HTML without JavaScript, most AI crawlers can't read it. What you see in view-source is what the engines see.

Part 5 — Decision hygiene

13. Name the owner. One person who can approve site changes within days, not committees. GEO installs stall on approval loops more than on any technical obstacle.

14. Agree the review cadence. Share-of-answer moves monthly, not daily. Agree upfront to judge the work quarterly against the day-zero baseline from steps 1–5.

15. Set the do-not-cross lines. Anything off-limits (claims you can't legally make, channels you won't touch, pages that can't change) — written down before work starts.

Scoring yourself

All 15 done: you're ready — any competent GEO work will be provably attributable. Ten or more: close; finish the baselines before anything ships. Under ten: do this first — otherwise, in six months, you'll be arguing about whether the work worked instead of reading it off a chart.

Want the audit steps (4–6) done for you? That's literally our free scan.