geo-score

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

geo-score

geo-score is an open-source AI visibility (GEO) scorer for websites, by Jianrun Tech (见润科技). Formerly geo-watch: geo-watch merged into geo-score in 1.2.0 and lives on as its levels 2 and 3. Website, docs and a free online check: geo-score.dev.

geo-score in 60 seconds

One command, a 0–100 score, the three gates, the gaps worth fixing first, and why every point can be re-checked.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/2270314f-446a-4c2d-b27f-11e1f6d66ff8

English · 60 seconds · Chinese version

Can AI engines cite your site? A free 0–100 score from one command. Do they? Check through their APIs with your own keys.

geo-score scores a website from 0 to 100 on whether AI answer engines can reach it, parse it, trust it and cite it, against a published, versioned rubric that anyone can recompute. Then, with your own API keys, it asks the engines the questions your buyers ask and records whom the answers cite. The score is free and needs nothing installed; the citation results are reported beside it and never added to it.

Quick start · Screenshots · What it checks · How accurate is it? · Docs · Website · Changelog · Public leaderboard

[License: MIT] [Rubric v1.1] [No dependencies] [Claude Code Skill] [MCP server] [PRs welcome] [AIV readiness of the leaderboard page, measured 2026-10-05 with geo-score 1.8.0] [PyPI] [Latest release]

Version: the current release is geo-score==1.8.3 on PyPI, with its tag, wheel and checksums on GitHub Releases; what changed is in the changelog. Every install line on this page is pinned to that release (scripts/release.py --bump moves them together), so the tool you run is the one these pages describe. The rubric is versioned separately, and v1.1 is current. main can run ahead of the release: for CI and client work, use the pinned release.

❤️ Sponsors

Want to appear here? · Sponsorship never affects the rubric, any score, the public leaderboard or the technical recommendations in these docs.

What problem it solves

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

An answer engine quotes passages from sources it can reach, parse and trust. The reasons a site is left out are often small and invisible from a browser: a robots.txt line that turns a retrieval crawler away, a page whose text only exists after JavaScript runs, figures with no source. geo-score finds which of these a site has and what each one is worth, then checks whether the engines cite it, in three levels:

Score (free, no key) → Ask one question (your API keys) → Watch a question set every week (your API keys).

Three levels, one tool

flowchart LR    S[Your site] --> L1["Level 1 · Score<br/>free, no key"]    L1 --> R["0–100 readiness<br/>5 pillars · 3 gates · biggest gaps"]    Q[Questions your buyers ask] --> L2["Level 2 · Ask<br/>one question, your API keys"]    Q --> L3["Level 3 · Watch<br/>a fixed question set, every week"]    L2 --> C["Who the answers cite<br/>you · competitors · third-party pages"]    L3 --> C    R -. reported side by side, never summed .- C

Level 1 is the score. Levels 2 and 3 measure the outcome the rubric keeps out of the score on purpose (two scores, never one): they are reported next to the 100 and never summed into it. A site can score 90 and still lose every answer to a competitor with more third-party coverage, and the reverse also happens, which is why you want both.

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. Because engines retrieve passages, this rubric gives Content Citability the most weight. That is a design choice, not a measured effect: the evidence for how much passage shape matters is thin, and the evidence table says where.

Most of what the rubric checks 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.

Two guides start here: can ChatGPT read your website?, a check you can do by hand and then with geo-score, and how geo-score differs from a general AI SEO skill.

Screenshots

Every image shows real output, captured for this page.

Core capabilities

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

Content Citability carries the most weight by design: answer engines retrieve passages, not domains. Whether passage shape outweighs domain authority is not established: the heaviest single check, p2.answer-passages, rests on thin support (where the evidence is thinnest).

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

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. In this repository's own benchmark, 85% of 324 sites reach Early and 6% reach Leading (where the cuts fall).

324 sites, scored in public

A quarter of them are unreadable to AI crawlers. 73 sites have a gate check at zero — an AI retrieval crawler cannot get the content, so it has nothing of theirs to quote. 20 block AI crawlers by name in robots.txt, which is an editorial choice and reported as such — amazon.com lands at 17 for exactly this reason. 41 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. At a further 12 the server refuses crawler user-agents (unverified probes from the auditor's address).

Median 55 (95% CI 51–58, stats.py). Range 11 to 96. 66 sites were scored on fewer than four pages; without them the median is 59.

The full table, by sector → · markdown · raw data · CSV · every site's full report · re-run it

Two more findings worth the click. Sites in the five China sectors score 22 points lower than everyone else (95% CI 16–30; median 36 against 58; earlier samples measured with 1.1.0 put the gap between 16 and 23 points). Grouped by the language a site serves instead, the 54 Chinese-language sites score 26 points lower than the 270 others (95% CI 22–32), and within matched sector families the gap runs from -8 to 27 points. Counted check by check in raw points, 69% of the gap sits in checks the CLI reads with a heuristic, so at most that share could be the tool misreading Chinese pages (the breakdown). The two largest per-check differences, question-shaped headings and self-contained answer passages, are heuristics the CLI also read lower than a human on the one Chinese site in the hand-audit comparison, so part of the gap may be the tool reading Chinese pages conservatively. From 1.5.0 the CLI reads each page in its own language and counts Chinese task, explanation and comparison headings; the leaderboard above was measured with 1.5.0, so its figures include that change. And statistics that carry a source and a named, verifiable byline are among the three largest gaps on more than half the sites.

Every number here is reproducible with the command in Quick start (the benchmark was run with 1.5.0 on 2026-10-02) — and we measured how reproducible. On 2026-10-12, 1.8.0 scored the whole list three times from one place the same day (the third run re-reading the first run's pages): of the 317 sites scored every time, 99% landed within ±5 between the first two runs and 81% scored identically (ICC 0.99, SEM 1.9; REPRODUCIBILITY.md, derived by benchmark/retest.py). An older 1.1.x build, measured on 2026-09-09, put 96% within ±5 and 45% identical. Read one site's score as ±5 rather than as exact; medians are stable. Most of what still moves is the knowledge-graph lookup, which went unanswered on most sites from that vantage, and the gate checks of sites whose bot protection answers a crawler differently from one run to the next. 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/.

How accurate is it?

Five questions people ask, and where this repository answers each one:

Against hand audits. The CLI leaves the three checks that need off-site search or human judgement out of the denominator rather than guessing (and a fourth, p4.cn-engines, unless the site serves Chinese). Re-scoring the five published hand audits on the same pages, it matched the auditor's tier on 80% of 84 check pairs (92% where it reads a rule, 69% where it approximates a judgement). On the checks both scored it read 2.4 points lower on average (per site from 12 lower to 10 higher; mean absolute difference 8.8). Its full normalised score read 5.2 points lower on average, from 16 lower to 7 higher, because the hand audits also score p3.listings, p3.mentions and p4.question-coverage, which the CLI leaves out. n=5, all of them calibration sites: VALIDITY.md lists every disagreement.

Quick start

One command

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.

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jianruntech/geo-score/v1.8.3/cli/geo_score.py \  | python3 - stripe.com --brief

  AIV READINESS  https://stripe.com──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────  72 / 100   Solid  11 points to Leading
  Reachable 13/15   ◐ Crawlers allowed in robots.txt   ███████████░░░░░░░  3/5   ✓ Reachable to retrieval agents    ██████████████████  5/5   ✓ Main content server-rendered     ██████████████████  5/5  Understandable 17/22   ◐ 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…) ██████████████████  4/4  Content Citability 21/35   ✓ Self-contained answer passages   ██████████████████  9/9   ◐ Headings match how people ask    ████████░░░░░░░░░░  3/7   ◐ Freshness signal present         █████████░░░░░░░░░  3/6   ◐ Statistics carry a source        ████████░░░░░░░░░░  3/7   ◐ Named, verifiable authorship     █████████░░░░░░░░░  3/6  Brand Credibility 9/10   ⊘ Third-party listings             ··················   —   ⊘ Independent mentions             ··················   —   ✓ Knowledge-graph entity           ██████████████████  4/4   ✓ sameAs links resolve             ██████████████████  3/3   ◐ Video and multimodal presence    ████████████░░░░░░  2/3  Answer Fit 2/4   ◐ Content shaped for extraction    █████████░░░░░░░░░  2/4   ⊘ Covers the questions people ask  ··················   —   ⊘ Chinese engine readiness         ··················   —  ✓ full · ◐ partial · ✗ zero · ⊘ not measured (left the denominator)
  Biggest gaps   +3 next tier (+3 to full)  Freshness signal present          needs: most pages do, and dateModified agrees with the visible date   +3 next tier (+3 to full)  Named, verifiable authorship      needs: and the name links to a verifiable identity page   +2 next tier (+2 to full)  Crawlers allowed in robots.txt    needs: mainstream retrieval user-agents explicitly allowed
  Scored 62 / 86 observable · 4 checks left the denominator · rubric v1.1 · took 91.5 s  Needs off-site search or judgement: p3.listings, p3.mentions, p4.question-coverage  Not observable this run: p4.cn-engines (not a Chinese-language site)
  Full rubric and what each tier means:  https://github.com/jianruntech/geo-score/blob/v1.5.0/rubric/v1.1.md  Score moved, or a check shows —? https://github.com/jianruntech/geo-score/blob/v1.5.0/guide/troubleshooting.md

From PyPI: uvx or pipx

All three levels. Levels 2 and 3 need cli/geo_watch.py next to cli/geo_score.py, and the package on PyPI has both; a clone, or both files downloaded, works too. Neither line below needs git or a build step.

uvx [email protected] example.com            # run it without installing (needs uv)pipx install geo-score==1.8.3              # or install the geo-score commandgeo-score example.com --explain            # every check, with the evidence behind it

Without access to PyPI, install the same wheel from the release: pipx install https://github.com/jianruntech/geo-score/releases/download/v1.8.3/geo_score-1.8.3-py3-none-any.whl. From source (needs git): pipx install git+https://github.com/jianruntech/[email protected]. Standard library only, whichever you pick. Release downloads carry a SHA256SUMS file, and the wheel and sdist on PyPI match it byte for byte (how to check).

python3 cli/geo_score.py example.com            # human-readablepython3 cli/geo_score.py example.com --explain  # with the evidence behind every checkpython3 cli/geo_score.py example.com --json     # conforms to schema/report.v2.jsonpython3 cli/geo_score.py example.com --compare competitor.com   # side by sidepython3 cli/geo_score.py example.com --badge aiv-badge.svg      # embeddable SVGpython3 cli/geo_score.py example.com --badge-json aiv-badge.json  # the same badge as shields.io endpoint JSONpython3 cli/geo_score.py example.com --share                    # one line to paste somewherepython3 cli/geo_score.py diff before.json after.json             # what changed between two reports, check by checkpython3 cli/geo_score.py example.com --baseline before.json --fail-on-drop   # CI: re-score the same pages, fail only on a drop

[![AIV readiness, scored with geo-score](aiv-badge.svg)](https://github.com/jianruntech/geo-score)

Claude Code skill

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

npx skills add jianruntech/geo-score     # add -g for a global install# then: /geo-score audit https://example.com

npx skills add runs the open skills CLI. It finds one skill in this repository, geo-score, and copies the whole repository (about 9 MB) as it is on the default branch, main, into .claude/skills/geo-score for Claude Code. Without Node.js, or for the release rather than main, clone the release tag into your own skills folder instead: git clone --branch v1.8.3 --depth 1 https://github.com/jianruntech/geo-score ~/.claude/skills/geo-score.

How close the CLI comes without the skill: How accurate is it?

MCP server

geo-score-mcp is a local MCP server (stdio, Python standard library only). It gives an agent the same three levels as the CLI: score a site for free, ask the AI engines one question, and track a question set week over week. uvx [email protected] mcp runs it from PyPI (geo-score-mcp after a pipx install), and python3 cli/geo_score.py mcp runs it from a clone.

[Add geo-score to Cursor] [Install geo-score in VS Code] [Install geo-score in VS Code Insiders] [Add geo-score to LM Studio]

The buttons and the lines below run geo-score 1.8.3 from PyPI with uvx, which needs only uv: no git and no build step. They add no keys of their own, but a server started from a shell that exports a provider key (Claude Code passes its environment on) can use it. For a server that cannot spend, add --read-only after mcp.

Claude Code

claude mcp add --scope user geo-score -- uvx [email protected] mcp

Standard config (no keys in the file) for any client that reads an mcpServers file:

{  "mcpServers": {    "geo-score": {      "command": "uvx",      "args": ["[email protected]", "mcp"]    }  }}

Claude Desktop does not read your shell's PATH: put the full path that which uvx prints in command.

Without access to PyPI, the release wheel: uvx --from https://github.com/jianruntech/geo-score/releases/download/v1.8.3/geo_score-1.8.3-py3-none-any.whl geo-score-mcp

From source (needs git): uvx --from git+https://github.com/jianruntech/[email protected] geo-score-mcp

Setup for each client (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, Gemini CLI, Devin Desktop, Zed), the Claude Code plugin, timeouts, security and troubleshooting: guide/mcp.md.

GitHub Action

Level 1 on every push: score the site, and fail the build when it regresses. For level 3 on a schedule, see examples/ci/watch-weekly.yml.

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

A gate at zero caps the score at 40: a site that would otherwise score 40 or more reads exactly 40 and passes fail-under: 40. fail-on-gate: true fails any capped site.

The job summary it writes is in Screenshots.

Levels 2 and 3 · does AI actually cite you?

--ask and watch put the questions your buyers ask to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, through each provider's search-enabled API with your own keys, and record who the answers cite: you, your competitors, or the third-party pages (forums, review sites) the engines lean on instead. Keys are read from the environment; geo-score never writes them anywhere.

git clone --branch v1.8.3 --depth 1 https://github.com/jianruntech/geo-score && cd geo-score/cliexport OPENAI_API_KEY=… PERPLEXITY_API_KEY=…         # any subset of engines workspython3 geo_score.py acme.com --ask "invoicing app for freelancers"        # level 2python3 geo_score.py watch init --brand Acme --domain acme.com --competitor "Rival=rival.com"# put the questions your buyers ask an AI assistant into queries.csv, then:python3 geo_score.py watch run --dry-run            # the plan, the caps, what a diff could detect and how precise one question's rate is; no calls, no costpython3 geo_score.py watch run                      # level 3: every question on every engine, savedpython3 geo_score.py watch diff                     # this run against the last, with a significance testpython3 geo_score.py watch report --since 30        # the last 30 days pooled, one interval over questions

Level 2 asks each engine each question once and prints the result under the readiness report (and into the report's citation object with --json). One ask is an anecdote: use it to see what the engines say today, not to measure a rate.

geo-score watch · Lumo · run 20260926T083000Z · api channel
6 questions × 2 engines × 2 = 24 planned · 23 answered · 1 failed · 0 skipped
Cited in 38% of answers to questions that do not name Lumo (6 of 16, 4 questions, 95% CI 12–62%) · mentioned in 38%Questions that name Lumo (2, kept out of the headline): cited in 100% (7 of 7, 95% CI 65–100%) · mentioned in 100%Your site was cited somewhere for 5 of 6 questions.
By engine  engine          model             cited         95% CI   mentioned  named first (tracked)  avg rank  chatgpt-api     gpt-6-luna        9/12 75%      42–100%  75%        9/12                   1.0  perplexity-api  sonar             4/11 36%      8–75%    36%        0/11                   2.0       1 failed  gemini-api      gemini-3.8-flash  not measured                                                       no_key: set GEMINI_API_KEY or GOOGLE_API_KEY
These rows, and the tables below, count every question, the 2 that name Lumo included.
Answer share your pages support: not measured; this run was saved before citation positions were recorded.
Sources listed and used in the answer: not measured; this run was saved before listed sources were recorded.
Repeat consistency of cited domains (per engine; descriptive, not read by diff)  engine          questions measured  pairs  median Jaccard  chatgpt-api     6/6                 6      1.00  perplexity-api  5/6                 5      1.00  gemini-api      not measured                               no_key
Least consistent questions (up to 3 per engine):  id   question                         engine          answers that cite  Jaccard  q02  ai video tool with no watermark  chatgpt-api     2                  0.50  q01  best free ai video generator     perplexity-api  2                  0.50
- Repeat consistency: for each question an engine answered more than once in this run, the overlap of the domains two of its answers cite, shared domains over all domains of the two (Jaccard), for every two answers, averaged per question; the median over questions per engine. 1: every ask cited the same domains; 0: no domain in common. Domains are read as everywhere in this report, www dropped; the order of citations is not compared.- Answers that cite nothing are left out: two empty lists are not agreement, and one empty list is not a 0. On an engine, a question with fewer than two answers that cite is not measured. Lowest: up to 3 questions per engine whose answers did not all cite the same domains, lowest first.- Descriptive only: no interval and no test, never part of the cited rate, and watch diff does not read it. It describes asks minutes apart in one run, which share that day's index; it is not computed over pooled runs.
Share of voice              cited  95% CI  mentioned  named first (tracked)  sentence share  Lumo (you)  57%    26–86%  57%        9/23                   100%  Pixa        52%    33–71%  100%       14/23                  100%
- Named first (tracked): answers that name that brand before any other brand in your config, out of the answers that name at least one of them. Brands your config does not list are not seen, so first among the brands you track may not be first in the answer. Two brands first named at the same place, one name inside the other, are neither first.- Sentence share: in the answers that name a brand, the mean share of their sentences that name it, every sentence counted the same. A sentence ends at a line break, at 。！？, or at . ! ? before a space.- Both read the answer as saved, which keeps its first 20,000 characters; a name that first appears after that is not seen.
Sources the engines cite most (not yours)  domain        answers  share  owner  pixa.example  12       52%    Pixa  reddit.com    11       48%
Questions where a competitor is cited and you are not (1)  id   question                    cited instead  q03  cheapest text to video app  Pixa
Who is named for each question  id   question                         answers  Lumo (you)             Pixa               no tracked brand named  searched yes/no/unknown  most cited  q01  best free ai video generator     4        cited 3/4 · named 3/4  cited 2 · named 4  0/4                     2/0/2                    Lumo (you)  q02  ai video tool with no watermark  4        cited 1/4 · named 1/4  cited 2 · named 4  0/4                     2/0/2                    Pixa  q03  cheapest text to video app       4        cited 0/4 · named 0/4  cited 2 · named 4  0/4                     2/0/2                    Pixa  q04  lumo vs pixa                     4        cited 4/4 · named 4/4  cited 2 · named 4  0/4                     2/0/2                    Lumo (you)  q05  pixa alternatives                4        cited 2/4 · named 2/4  cited 2 · named 4  0/4                     2/0/2                    —  q06  鹿末视频免费吗                   3        cited 3/3 · named 3/3  cited 2 · named 3  0/3                     2/0/1                    —
- An answer given without a web search cannot cite anything.- "No tracked brand named" counts answers that name none of the brands in your config; they may name others.- Perplexity and OpenRouter search on every call or do not say, so their answers count as unknown under searched.
By question type  type         cited     95% CI   mentioned  alternative  2/4 50%   15–85%   50%  list         4/8 50%   22–78%   50%  pricing      3/7 43%   0–100%   43%  vs           4/4 100%  51–100%  100%
What the engines searched for (from 12 answers that show it)  times  search  2      best free ai video generator  2      ai video tool with no watermark  2      cheapest text to video app  2      lumo vs pixa  2      pixa alternatives  2      鹿末视频免费吗
- Of 12 searches: 0 contain a year, 6 contain a ranking or comparison word.
Ledger24 questions asked · 23 API requests · 14,620 in / 4,860 out tokens · 23 searches · $0.07 + 12 answers with no price (add prices to geo-score-watch.json)1 failed after 24 HTTP requests in all; a request that timed out may still be billed.Caps: at most 100 questions.
Read this before quoting the numbers- API channel. Answers come from each provider's search-enabled API, which is not the consumer app. Compare runs with runs; never pool them with answers sampled by hand in the apps.- The same question gets different answers from one ask to the next, and answers to one question move together. Rates carry a 95% interval: Wilson when each question was answered once, a bootstrap over questions when a question has several answers. diff pairs the questions both runs answered and calls a change a change only when an exact paired test (McNemar, or a sign-flip test when a question has several answers), Holm-corrected across engines, says so (p < 0.05).- A question that names the brand invites an answer that cites it. Those questions are kept out of the headline rate and reported on a line of their own.- Engines without a key, calls that failed and calls skipped by a cap count as not measured, never as zero.- This measures citations. It does not predict traffic, rankings or revenue.- This run was saved before questions were flagged at run time. Questions that name the brand were found when this report was made, from the saved question text and the run's brand name, aliases and domains.

Run it yourself, or have it run for you. Everything here is MIT; the tool has no paid edition. You pay your model providers directly and the ledger shows what each run used. What needs people rather than an API, Jianrun does as a service:

Who it is for

geo-score measures whether engines can cite a site and whether they do. It does not fix anything, and it never predicts traffic, rankings or revenue.

Boundaries and governance

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.

Other honest limits:

• It measures input-side readiness, not outcomes. A high readiness score means engines can cite you. Whether they do depends on competition, query intent and factors no external audit can observe. Citation performance is reported as a separate, unscored block and never folded into the 100 — see Two scores. Measure it with levels 2 and 3 above. One reason it stays out: asked again, the same question gets a largely different set of sources. Repeated runs of a prompt within 24 hours, counting runs that cited something, had a mean source overlap (Jaccard) of 0.32 to 0.43 in each of four industries in one market with four engines pooled, and 0.23 to 0.51 engine by engine (Schulte et al. 2026, §5, Tables 4 and 6), and two runs of Google AI Overviews on the same device and location 0.66 (Grossman et al., SIGIR 2026, §4.4, Table 4).
• Brand Credibility and the named-author check need human judgement. "Is this a real identifiable person" and "is this mention independent" are not fully automatable. Treat those ~24 points as assisted, not automatic.
• Tiers reduce disagreement, they do not remove it. Every tier names a count out of the 8 sampled pages, so two auditors agree on the arithmetic. They can still disagree on whether a given paragraph is a self-contained answer. The settled ambiguities are the ones we found; there will be more.
• Heavily client-rendered sites score low, sometimes unfairly. If your content only appears after hydration, most checks will read the pre-hydration HTML — which is also roughly what a crawler sees, so the low score is usually right, but verify by hand.
• Engine behaviour moves. The rubric is versioned for exactly this reason. A score from an older rubric version is not comparable to a current one.

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:

• Versioned. Every score reports the rubric version. 71 (v1.1) is a claim; 71 is not.
• Tiered, with counts. Each tier names a page count out of 8, not "most".
• Evidence-bound. Every check requires an observation someone else can reproduce.
• Calibrated against public benchmarks, with the record published — including the four external sources the thresholds were checked against, and the eight specification ambiguities that real audits surfaced and v1.1 settled.
• Machine-readable. rubric/v1.1.json with stable check ids, and schema/report.v2.json so results from different implementations are comparable.

Implement it in your own stack, disagree with a weight, open a rubric proposal. That is the main thing we want contributions on. How a proposal becomes a new version, who decides, and why we sell no certification and pay for no seat on a standard: rubric governance.

Research behind the weights

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

• Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024 — in a simulated engine, rewriting one source at a time to cite sources, add statistics or quote experts raised that source's share of the answer by up to about 40% (Position-Adjusted Word Count, not citation count). The paper also found an authoritative tone produced no significant improvement, which is why this rubric scores structure and attribution, not voice. The gain does not carry over cleanly: when every source was rewritten at once, the source that had ranked first lost 20 to 30% of its visibility (§5.2, Table 2), and a later benchmark that measures citation rank found most published methods gave no significant gain (C-SEO Bench, arXiv 2506.11097 §6.2). The details are in the evidence table, row p2.sourced-stats (rubric/evidence-v1.1.md).
• llms.txt proposal, Answer.AI — the convention this rubric checks for in the Understandable pillar (p1.llms-txt).

Every check declares what its weight rests on (published research, a vendor's own documentation, our field observation, or a convention no engine has confirmed using), with sources and the date they were last verified: rubric/evidence-v1.1.md. Where the evidence is thin (p2.answer-passages, p2.question-intent, p1.llms-txt), the table says so. If you have evidence that a weight is wrong, open a rubric proposal — that is the main thing we want contributions on.

Related tools

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

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

Stability, privacy and security

Install options are in Quick start.

• Stability: the rubric and the tool are versioned separately, and the report schema, check ids, CLI flags, exit codes, Action inputs and MCP tools are public contracts. What may change in which release: the stability policy.
• No telemetry. geo-score sends nothing to us or anyone else. Level 1 fetches the site you name (following its redirects), the URLs its markup and robots.txt point to (sameAs profiles, logo, sitemap), and Wikidata and Wikipedia search; levels 2 and 3 call only the AI providers whose keys you set.
• Security: text quoted from the audited site is fenced as data in every report, the MCP server's score_site connects only to public addresses, and keys never reach a file. Threat model and reporting: security policy.

Why did my score move 4 points? Each run samples up to 8 pages, and the sample changes; in a same-day retest with 1.8.0, 99% of sites stayed within ±5 (REPRODUCIBILITY.md). To compare before and after a change, re-score the same pages with --baseline last.json, which also prints what changed, check by check (--urls-from last.json re-scores them without the comparison). Why does a check show —? It was not measured, so it left the denominator instead of scoring 0. More answers: troubleshooting. Every term the README, the reports and the guides use is defined in the glossary; every flag, exit code and watch command is in the CLI reference (简体中文).

For developers

Repository layout

Tests and the gate

bash scripts/check.sh           # the gate, offline: structure, lint, every test suite, the Action, packagingbash scripts/check.sh --live    # before a release: also example.com and the MCP Inspector

scripts/check.sh is the CI: nothing merges unless it passes. The rules it enforces, and the check behind each one, are in AGENTS.md. Several figures on this page are among them: when one no longer matches the data it quotes, the gate fails.

Contributing

The most valuable contribution is evidence about the weights. See the contributing guide. Which issue form takes a wrong score, a disputed leaderboard row or a tool that does not work: getting help.

License, citation and maintainers

License

MIT

Citation

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

Who maintains this

Built and maintained by Jianrun Tech (见润科技), Shenzhen. We run GEO and AI-adoption programs for companies in China and abroad: B2B exporters, software companies, professional services, local businesses, education providers, and companies going global, cross-border e-commerce included. 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.

Documentation