GEO is the new SEO — and most sites are failing at it

A developer built a tool that checks how visible websites are to AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, revealing that most sites are failing at Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). The tool, integrated into WebScore, found that about 60% of sites unintentionally block at least one major AI crawler, 80% lack an llms.txt file, and 70% are missing FAQ schema. Sites with Wikidata entries get cited three times more often in AI responses.

I built a tool that checks how visible your site is to AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini — and the results are eye-opening. Meta tags, backlinks, Core Web Vitals — the SEO checklist is well-known. But there's a new game in town: Generative Engine Optimization GEO . When someone asks ChatGPT "what's the best tool for X?", does your brand show up? When Perplexity answers a question in your niche, does it cite you? Most sites have no idea. What GEO actually checks After building the GEO agent in WebScore, here are the signals that actually matter for AI engine visibility: llms.txt AI crawlers look for /llms.txt — a plain-text file that tells LLMs what your site is about and what they're allowed to use. Think robots.txt but for AI. Most sites don't have one. E-E-A-T signals Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. AI models are trained to favour sites with clear author attribution, About pages, Contact pages, and organisation schema. Missing any of these? You're invisible. FAQ schema Structured FAQPage JSON-LD gives AI engines pre-digested Q&A pairs to pull from. It's one of the highest-ROI things you can add. Authority citations Pages that cite 2+ authoritative sources Wikipedia, government sites, academic papers get 27.5% more AI visibility according to research. AI engines use outbound authority links as credibility signals. Wikidata entity ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity use Wikidata to validate brand facts — founding date, industry, HQ, products. Without a Wikidata entry, AI engines have no structured knowledge graph anchor for your brand. Crawl access Are GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and GoogleOther allowed in your robots.txt? Many sites accidentally block them. What we found running it on real sites ~60% of sites block at least one major AI crawler unintentionally ~80% have no llms.txt ~70% are missing FAQ schema entirely Sites with Wikidata entries get cited 3x more often in AI responses How we measure it The GEO agent in WebScore runs live checks against your URL and returns: AI Mention Rate — how often your brand appears in AI responses Citation Rate — how often AI engines link back to you as a source Issue list — specific fixes ranked by impact https://www.webscore.dev/ https://www.webscore.dev/ No signup. Results in ~60 seconds.