Citability Audit

The citability audit is the second phase of the GEO Protocol. It comes after gap mapping, where baseline QPR is measured, and before structural intervention.

Without a systematic audit, GEO work often focuses on visible but secondary issues while ignoring the constraints that most directly reduce QPR.

How to run a citability audit

A citability audit usually follows five steps.

1. Select the product families — prioritize the families with the highest commercial relevance and the lowest current presence in decision answers.
2. Map the public sources — identify the website pages, technical documents, directories, company profiles, and external mentions that a model can plausibly inspect.
3. Score the five dimensions — evaluate parameterization, terminological consistency, public accessibility, explicit comparability, and coherent distribution.
4. Calculate the index — assign a comparable score across product families so priorities emerge clearly.
5. Define the intervention priorities — focus first on the dimensions that are weak across multiple families, not on isolated imperfections.

What the audit produces

The output is not a generic content review. It is an operational map of where structured citability breaks down, which sources must be fixed first, and where QPR can improve fastest.