How we check websites and write our guides
This page explains how geo-rank.ai checks websites and the rules we follow when writing guides. It exists so that a reader knows where our claims come from and what we do not promise.
What an audit checks
An audit starts with what a search or AI crawler actually receives, not with what a person sees in a browser. We request pages without executing JavaScript and check whether the text is present in the first server response. We verify that the site lives on one host (apex or www) and that the other one returns a permanent redirect with no chains or loops. We read robots.txt separately for each AI crawler: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Bingbot. We cross-check canonical, hreflang, the sitemap and llms.txt against each other: they must point to the same URLs. We inspect Schema.org markup and whether it matches the visible text. We measure server response time and page weight.
The second part is content: does the page answer the buyer's question in its first paragraphs, does it contain verifiable facts (prices, timelines, what a service includes, names, dates), and does the company description stay consistent across language versions.
How we measure AI answers
One query to an assistant proves nothing: answers change from session to session. We therefore ask each question in a clean session at least three times, separately for each language and each assistant, and record the date. We log whether the site is named, at which position, whether it is linked, which pages are cited and who else appears in the answer. One-off screenshots do not go into reports.
Which data we treat as confirmed
Every external figure in a guide has a source and a date. We distinguish three statuses: confirmed by a primary source (Google, OpenAI or Anthropic documentation, a published study with a described sample), a retelling of a secondary source, and our own assumption. Figures of the second and third kind are either labelled as such or left out. We do not rank assistants against each other by speed or "quality" without our own measurement, and we do not transfer data from one market to another.
What we do not promise
We do not guarantee that a site will appear in AI answers, at any position or by any date. Technical fixes remove obstacles; they do not create demand for citation. If a check shows that part of a site already works correctly, the report says so plainly, without invented tasks.
How guides are written and updated
Every guide is reviewed before publication: facts are checked against sources, wording against this methodology. The publication date is set once. An "Updated" note appears only after a substantive change: new data, changed platform rules, a corrected error. Fixes to typos, links or layout do not change the date.
Found an error?
Write to hello@geo-rank.ai with the page URL and a description. Confirmed errors are corrected and the correction date is noted in the guide.
Published: · geo-rank.ai