GEO Authority Score (GAS): domain authority for generative search

Six readiness dimensions

Machine access 18 (explicit robots.txt rules for GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, plus llms.txt), structured data 20, entity consistency 17, answer extractability 18, freshness and depth 15, citation signals 12. Site-level checks run once; page-level checks average the homepage plus up to nine pages sampled evenly from the sitemap.

Adoption is measured, never assumed

Adoption combines a deterministic model knowledge probe (temperature 0, raw answers archived), presence in model source recommendations, and real citations observed in the last 90 days. When a probe is unavailable it scores zero — no speculative credit.

Trajectory: authority accrues over time

Tiered by the first archive.org snapshot age, combined with archive continuity, in-platform score growth and citation momentum. A brand-new domain cannot score high in one pass.

What to fix first when the score is low

1) Allow major AI crawlers explicitly in robots.txt and publish llms.txt. 2) Open every page with an extractable answer capsule and a clear H2 structure. 3) Add Organization, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage and Article structured data. 4) Attribute figures to named sources with an as-of date. 5) Keep publishing and earn external citations — this part cannot be bought with markup.

FAQ

Does a high GAS guarantee AI citations?

No. GAS quantifies readiness and adoption; it is not a citation-rate promise. We report descriptive statistics only, with no causal claim.

Can the algorithm change silently?

No. Any weight change bumps the version, is recorded in a public changelog, and is mirrored in the public reference script so third parties can reproduce results.