The Product-Resident GEO Audit Checklist
One page, five layers and a baseline, in the order to work them. Free to use, share and adapt with attribution: Product-Resident GEO Audit Checklist, Deepak Gupta, guptadeepak.com.
0. Baseline: the description test
- Truth sheet written and signed off by product, product marketing and sales
- Prompt set of 50 to 100 prompts built from real deals, tickets and RFPs, segmented by vertical
- Each prompt run repeatedly across the engines your buyers use
- Every answer scored as missing, wrong, vague or accurate against the truth sheet
1. Feature naming
- Every branded feature paired with its functional term and standard name
- Pairing appears on docs titles, pricing page, changelog, product data and listings
- Public naming map links brand names to standard terms
- Renamed features carry "formerly" notes and redirects
- Naming review includes buyer phrases, standard term and launch surfaces
2. Documentation
- Docs public by default; only genuinely sensitive material gated
- Content served as HTML that crawlers can read without JavaScript
- Answer-first pages with question-shaped headings using standard names
- Limits, versions and compatibility stated in tables
- Comparison and migration guides published
- Last-updated dates visible; deprecations marked
- AI agent reads segmented in analytics
3. Product data
- One owner and one system for canonical product facts
- Facts carry owner, last-verified date and where published
- Pages, docs tables and structured data generated from the source where possible
- Organization and product markup valid and matching visible content
4. Self-description consistency
- Canonical descriptions at one line, 50 words and 150 words, used verbatim
- Is / is-not statement published
- Five owned surfaces compared side by side and reconciled
- Directories, marketplaces and review profiles updated quarterly
- Legacy pages redirected or clearly marked as historical
5. Capability exposure
- Public capability catalog and integration catalog
- Standards, certifications with dates, data residency and subprocessors public
- Pricing model public enough to describe correctly
- API reference generated from a current spec
- Crawler policy set deliberately for training, search and user-triggered bots
- Any agent interface read-only first, with scoped authentication and logging
Practice
- One accountable owner; product marketing coordinating four layers
- Product-layer fixes tracked in the product team's backlog
- Every change logged; tests run with controls
- Definition of done includes naming pairing, docs at launch and fact model update