geo-score README

The project's README from github.com/jianruntech/geo-score. As one markdown file: README.md.

English · 简体中文

geo-score — an open rubric for AI answer-engine visibility

geo-score

Will ChatGPT cite your site? Score it in 20 seconds.

License: MIT Rubric v1.1 No dependencies Claude Code Skill PRs welcome AIV readiness

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jianruntech/geo-score/main/cli/geo_score.py \
  | python3 - stripe.com --brief

geo-score scoring stripe.com from the command line — 71 out of 100, band Solid

One command. About twenty seconds. Every check, and what the next tier needs.

Full output — every check, its evidence, and what the next tier asks for
  AIV READINESS  https://stripe.com
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  71 / 100   Solid
  12 points to Leading

  Reachable 11/15
   ◐ Crawlers allowed in robots.txt   ███████████░░░░░░░  3/5
   ✓ Reachable to retrieval agents    ██████████████████  5/5
   ◐ Main content server-rendered     ███████████░░░░░░░  3/5
  Understandable 15/22
   ◐ Sitemap discoverable and fresh   █████████░░░░░░░░░  2/4
   ✓ llms.txt present and structured  ██████████████████  5/5
   ✓ Organization + WebSite schema    ██████████████████  6/6
   ✗ BreadcrumbList on nested pages   ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  0/3
   ◐ Page-type schema (Product, FAQ…) █████████░░░░░░░░░  2/4
  Content Citability 25/35
   ✓ Self-contained answer passages   ██████████████████  9/9
   ◐ Headings match how people ask    ████████░░░░░░░░░░  3/7
   ◐ Freshness signal present         █████████░░░░░░░░░  3/6
   ✓ Statistics carry a source        ██████████████████  7/7
   ◐ Named, verifiable authorship     █████████░░░░░░░░░  3/6
  Brand Credibility 8/10
   ⊘ Third-party listings             ··················   —
   ⊘ Independent mentions             ··················   —
   ✓ Knowledge-graph entity           ██████████████████  4/4
   ◐ sameAs links resolve             ████████████░░░░░░  2/3
   ◐ Video and multimodal presence    ████████████░░░░░░  2/3
  Answer Fit 2/4
   ◐ Content shaped for extraction    █████████░░░░░░░░░  2/4
   ⊘ Covers the questions people ask  ··················   —
   ⊘ Chinese engine readiness         ··················   —
  Biggest gaps
   +4   Headings match how people ask    about half do
   +3   Named, verifiable authorship     and the name links to a verifiable identity page
   +3   Freshness signal present         most pages do, and dateModified agrees with the visible date

  Scored 61 / 86 observable · 4 checks left the denominator · rubric v1.1
  Needs judgement: p3.listings, p3.mentions, p4.question-coverage, p4.cn-engines

  Full rubric and what each tier means:
  https://github.com/jianruntech/geo-score

Python 3.8+, standard library only, nothing to install. It reads public URLs and prints a score against a published, versioned rubric — not a black box.

See how 314 well-known sites score → · a quarter of them cannot be cited at all.

GEO means Generative Engine Optimization — getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. Nothing to do with geography or maps.


Why this is a different question from SEO

Classic SEO asks where do I rank. Answer engines don't rank — they retrieve passages, decide whether a source is worth quoting, and cite it. Different question, different failure modes: a site can sit at position 3 on Google and never be quoted, while a page nobody links to gets cited daily because its passages are clean.

Most of what determines this is mechanical and cheap to fix — a robots.txt line, a JSON-LD block, a date in a template, a paragraph rewritten so it stands on its own. The hard part is knowing which of them you are missing, and what each one is worth.

What it checks

21 tiered checks totalling 100 points, plus 4 bonus checks worth up to +6 outside the denominator. Full specification: rubric/v1.1.md · 简体中文

Pillar Pts Asks
Reachable — gates 15 Can a retrieval crawler get the page at all? robots.txt, live reachability across 10 AI user-agents, server-rendered content
Understandable 22 Can it tell what the page and the company are? Organization + WebSite, llms.txt, sitemap, breadcrumbs, page-type schema
Content Citability 35 Is there anything here worth quoting? Self-contained answer passages, headings that match how people ask, sourced figures, real bylines, freshness
Brand Credibility 18 Why should an engine trust it? Knowledge-graph entity, third-party listings, sameAs that resolves, video presence
Answer Fit 10 Is the content shaped to be lifted into an answer?

Content Citability carries the most weight on purpose: answer engines retrieve passages, not domains. Passage shape beats domain authority more often than classic SEO intuition expects.

Every scored check is tiered — 2 to 4 tiers, each naming a count out of the 8 sampled pages, so two people scoring the same site agree on the arithmetic. Three checks are gates: score zero on crawler access, live reachability or server-rendered content and the result caps at 40, because until a crawler can reach the content nothing else you change has any effect.

Bands

0–30 31–50 51–65 66–82 83–100
Not started Early Growing Solid Leading

Band names describe a stage, not a verdict. External benchmarks put most business sites in the 30–55 range, so a score in the forties is ordinary, not alarming.

314 sites, scored in public

A quarter of them cannot be cited at all. 80 sites have a gate check at zero — a retrieval crawler simply cannot get the content. 19 block AI crawlers by name in robots.txt, which is an editorial choice and reported as such — amazon.com lands at 12 for exactly this reason. 45 serve a page whose body only exists after JavaScript runs. Their content is there, a browser sees it, and a crawler gets an empty shell. That group almost certainly did not choose it. A further 16 hand a crawler an outright error.

Median 56. Range 12 to 98.

Site Score Band
pulumi.com 98 Leading
minimaxi.com 95 Leading
lumalabs.ai 93 Leading
resend.com 93 Leading
ironcladapp.com 91 Leading
…
amazon.com 12 Not started
keepa.com 12 Not started
mercadolibre.com 12 Not started

The full table, by sector → · markdown · raw data · re-run it

Two more findings worth the click: sites built for the Chinese market score 19 points lower than everyone else (median 40 against 59 — a gap that has held between 16 and 23 points across five separate samples, from 38 sites up to 314), and the same three cheap things — a date in the page template, an opening paragraph that stands on its own, one JSON-LD block — are missing from more than half the field.

Every number here is reproducible with the command at the top of this page — and we measured how reproducible. Running the whole benchmark twice and comparing every site: 96% land within ±5, 45% land identically. Read one site's score as ±5 rather than as exact; medians are stable. The unstable part is the gate checks, where five sites flipped between runs because their bot protection answered a crawler differently. The band, the control experiment and the per-site pairs are in benchmark/REPRODUCIBILITY.md.

For five reference sites we also publish hand-scored audits covering all 21 checks, with the evidence behind each one: examples/audits/v1.1/.

Three ways to run it

CLI — no install, no dependencies, 20 seconds.

python3 cli/geo_score.py example.com            # human-readable
python3 cli/geo_score.py example.com --explain  # with the evidence behind every check
python3 cli/geo_score.py example.com --json     # conforms to schema/report.v2.json
python3 cli/geo_score.py example.com --compare competitor.com   # side by side
python3 cli/geo_score.py example.com --badge aiv-badge.svg      # embeddable SVG
python3 cli/geo_score.py example.com --share                    # one line to paste somewhere

GitHub Action — score on every push, fail the build when it regresses.

- uses: jianruntech/geo-score@v1
  with:
    url: https://example.com
    fail-under: 40

Claude Code skill — the CLI measures what a static fetch can see. Four checks need off-site search or human judgement, and the skill does those too.

git clone https://github.com/jianruntech/geo-score ~/.claude/skills/geo-score
# then: /geo-score audit https://example.com

The CLI leaves those four checks out of the denominator rather than guessing, so it reads a little lower than a full audit — typically by 5 to 15 points on an established brand, which has listings and mentions the CLI cannot see.

Why a rubric, not just a tool

A score you cannot audit is a number someone made up. So the specification is the product, and the tools are implementations of it:

Implement it in your own stack, disagree with a weight, open a rubric proposal. That is the main thing we want contributions on.

Scope — what this does not do

This is the part most tools leave out, so it's stated plainly.

AIV Score measures. It does not fix.

Not included Why
Fix templates — robots.txt, JSON-LD blocks, llms.txt boilerplate Remediation is where the actual work and judgement live. It is a separate, non-open project
Content rewriting — how to shape a passage so it gets quoted Same
Per-engine tactics — what to do differently for Perplexity vs Gemini Same
A remediation roadmap Same

Other honest limits:

Research behind the weights

The weights are opinionated but not invented. The two findings that most shaped them:

Where a check rests on our own field observation rather than published research, the rubric says so. If you have evidence that a weight is wrong, open a rubric proposal — that is the main thing we want contributions on.

Deliberately naming what this is not, so you can pick correctly:

Project What it does Relationship
llms-txt The llms.txt specification itself AIV checks for compliance with it
yao-geo-skills 21 categorized GEO skills, execution-oriented Complementary — they do production, this does measurement
GEOFlow Full GEO operations system for company sites Much larger scope; AGPL

If you need remediation and not just a score, those projects overlap with the part this repo deliberately excludes.

Who maintains this

Built and maintained by Jianrun Tech (见润科技), Shenzhen — we run GEO and AI-adoption programs for cross-border commerce companies. The rubric came out of client work and out of optimizing our own products; publishing it is how we'd like AI visibility to be measured consistently, including by people who never become our clients.

Commercial use of this repository is unrestricted under MIT — including inside paid consulting work. You do not need our permission, and there is no separate commercial licence.

Contributing

The most valuable contribution is evidence about the weights. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Citation

If you reference the rubric in research or a report, see CITATION.cff.

License

MIT

geo-score (jianruntech/geo-score)

Searching Database…

What is this?A free command-line scorecard for AI visibility: it reads your site the way answer-engine crawlers do and prints a 0-100 readiness score against a published, versioned rubric — not a black box.
Is it a hosted web app, or do I run it myself?You run it yourself: a dependency-free Python CLI, a GitHub Action that scores on every push and can fail the build when the score regresses, a Claude Code skill, and an MCP server. There is no hosted dashboard — it reads public URLs directly.
How do I run it against my site?You need Python 3.8+ and nothing else — it is standard library only, so there is nothing to install. Point the CLI at your URL and in about twenty seconds you get the score plus every check with its evidence and what the next tier would require.
Which AI providers does it talk to, and whose API keys does it use?Scoring talks to no AI provider — it fetches your pages and applies the rubric locally. The ask and weekly citation-tracking features use your own API keys with OpenAI, Perplexity, Gemini, Anthropic or OpenRouter.
Does the CLI really check everything in the rubric?No — four checks need off-site search or human judgement, so the CLI leaves them out of the denominator instead of guessing, which typically reads 5-15 points lower than a full audit on an established brand. The Claude Code skill does those four too.
Is it free to use in commercial work?Yes — MIT, and commercial use is explicitly unrestricted, including inside paid consulting work; no permission or separate commercial licence needed.
What do the 21 checks actually look at?Five pillars: Reachable 15 pts (crawler access), Understandable 22 (schema, llms.txt, sitemap), Content Citability 35 (self-contained quotable passages), Brand Credibility 18 (third-party trust signals), Answer Fit 10. Citability weighs most because answer engines retrieve passages, not domains.
Why did amazon.com land at just 12 out of 100?Three checks are gates: if a retrieval crawler cannot get the content — a robots.txt block, a bot wall, or a page body that only appears after JavaScript — the check scores zero and the whole result caps at 40. Amazon and 18 other sites block AI crawlers by name.
Will it tell me how to fix what it finds?No — it measures, it does not fix. Template fixes, JSON-LD and llms.txt boilerplate, content rewriting and per-engine tactics are deliberately out of scope; remediation is a separate, non-open project, and the README names complementary tools for that part.
What is a typical score for a normal business site?Most business sites land in the 30-55 band, so a score in the forties is ordinary, not alarming. In the project's public benchmark of 314 well-known sites the median was 56, and a quarter could not be cited at all because a gate check sat at zero.
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