How to Run Your First Free GEO Audit on PeakRank (and Read the Results)

Every PeakRank engagement starts the same way: with a free GEO audit. It's the fastest, lowest-commitment way to see something most South African businesses have never seen — what the AI answer engines actually say about them. This guide walks you through running your first one and, more importantly, reading it.

Step 1: Start the audit

Go to peakrank.co.za and enter your domain. That's the whole sign-up. You don't need payment details, and you don't need to install anything on your site.

Behind that single input, PeakRank kicks off a process that would take a person days to do by hand.

Step 2: What happens behind the scenes

This is where Anthropic's Claude does the heavy lifting. The audit:

• Generates the real questions your customers ask — not vanity keywords, but buyer-intent prompts like "who does GEO in South Africa?" or "best [your service] in [your city]".
• Puts those questions to the major AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini — and reads the answers.
• Extracts who got cited: is it you, a competitor, or nobody at all?
• Checks the technical and content signals on your site that decide whether an engine can quote you — structure, headings, schema, clarity.

Claude reads and classifies all of that at a volume and speed no manual audit can match. A human reviews the output before it reaches you.

Step 3: Read your visibility score

Your dashboard surfaces a visibility score — a single number for how present your brand is across AI answers and search. Don't fixate on the number itself; read the breakdown under it:

• Where you're already cited. These are strengths to defend and expand.
• Where a competitor is cited and you're not. These are your highest-value gaps — demand exists, and someone else is capturing it.
• Where nobody is cited. Open territory. Often the cheapest wins, because you're not displacing an incumbent.

A low score isn't bad news — it's a map. Every gap is a question your future customers are already asking an AI, with your name absent from the answer.

Step 4: Turn the audit into a plan

The audit ends with a prioritised list of moves, not a vague "improve your SEO." Typically:

1. Fix the foundation — any technical or structured-data issues stopping engines from quoting you.
2. Close the top citation gaps — publish or rework content engineered to be the source an AI quotes for your highest-value questions.
3. Track and compound — re-run visibility regularly so you can see the needle move and double down on what works.

Step 5: Decide how far to take it

Some businesses take the audit and run the plan themselves — that's genuinely fine, and the free tools support it. Others want PeakRank to execute the whole programme, the way we did for whatthewordsays.org, which grew its audience roughly 8.8× year-on-year. Either way, the audit is the same honest starting point.

Run yours at peakrank.co.za — it costs nothing but the half hour it takes to read it properly.