# GeoXylia
> State of GEO 2026: a 476-site audit. Median GEO readiness is 75/100; B2B SaaS 78.0, local 68.0. The full dataset, by industry, is inside this report.
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## State of GEO 2026: What a 476-Site Audit Reveals

The median GEO readiness score across 476 audited sites is 75.0 out of 100. B2B SaaS leads at 78.0. Local businesses trail at 68.0. Here is the full benchmark dataset from GeoXylia's 2026 analysis.

Ethan Lim2026-07-2614 min

Last updated: 2026-08-15

Part of the Advanced GEO learning path

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According to GeoXylia's 476-site benchmark (August 2026), the median site scores 75.0/100 on GEO readiness — but the top decile's median brand score hits 93 while the bottom half sits at 65, a 28-point brand gap that separates AI-visible companies from invisible ones. This is the State of GEO 2026, GeoXylia's benchmark of 600 sites audited in August 2026, of which 476 completed the full assessment. Every number in this report comes from real citation checks against five AI surfaces.

The five findings below matter most.

## Executive Summary

The median site is a 75.0, and most of the web clusters in a narrow band. The median GEO readiness score across 476 sites is 75.0/100, with a mean of 68.4 (GeoXylia, 2026). The 10th percentile is 55 and the 90th percentile is 81. Most sites are "fine" — and therefore interchangeable to AI engines.

The brand gap is one of the biggest divides in GEO. The top decile of sites has a median brand score of 93; the bottom half has a median of 65 (GeoXylia, 2026). That 28-point gap is on par with the platform gap (28 points) and wider than the entity gap (16.5 points). AI engines consistently cite the brands they can identify, verify, and trust.

Technical foundation and content quality predict citability. Citability correlates with overall score at 0.961, overall with technical foundation at 0.944, and content with overall at 0.937 (GeoXylia, 2026). Sites that are technically accessible and content-rich are the ones AI engines cite.

Vertical differences are small; execution differences are large. The spread between the top vertical (B2B SaaS, 78.0) and the bottom (local business, 68.0) is only 10 points (GeoXylia, 2026). The spread inside every vertical is much wider: within-vertical execution beats industry choice.

B2B SaaS leads at 78.0 while local businesses trail at 68.0, with the overall median at 75.0 across 476 audited sites.

Bot protection is silently excluding a fifth of the web. 122 of 600 sites (roughly 20%) could not complete the audit because bot protection blocked our crawlers (GeoXylia, 2026). If AI crawlers cannot access a site, the site cannot be cited — regardless of content quality.

## How was the 476-site benchmark collected?

## Site Selection

We selected 600 websites in August 2026. Two returned no crawl response at all and were excluded before analysis, so 598 produced crawl results: 476 completed the full assessment and 122 were excluded because bot protection blocked the audit crawler from completing all checks. The full dataset (476 sites, 15 columns) is available as a public CSV with the benchmark methodology.

- Selection method: GeoXylia audit signups, publicly available industry lists, and organic search results for non-branded commercial keywords.
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- Audit window: August 2026.
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- AI surfaces tested: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity.
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- Completion rate: 476 of 600 sites (79.3%, GeoXylia, 2026).
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## Scoring Dimensions

Each site received a GEO readiness score from 0 to 100, built from the audit engine's 9-dimension framework:

- 1AI Citation Score — passage retrieval, quote uniqueness, and authority signals
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- 2Answer Readiness / LLMO — entity precision, synthesis readiness, and structured content
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- 3Brand Signals — unlinked mentions, citation context quality, and entity consistency
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- 4Entity Clarity — schema.org depth, Wikipedia/Wikidata presence, and E-E-A-T signals
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- 5Content Depth — topic coverage, Q&A alignment, and paragraph depth
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- 6Platform Readiness — llms.txt audit, robots.txt directives, and headless render fidelity
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- 7Technical Foundation — Core Web Vitals, HTTPS, and structured data validity
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- 8Source Authority — outbound link quality, data source citations, and expert quotes
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- 9Media Readiness — image alt text, ARIA labels, and descriptive media ratio
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Scores are calibrated so that the median site lands at 75.0, with the 10th percentile at 55 and the 90th percentile at 81.

## What are the key findings by dimension?

## Citability Is the Outcome, Not an Input

The strongest correlation in the dataset is citability with the overall score: 0.961. That is close to a definitional relationship, which makes sense: citability is the behavioral output of all the other dimensions. The interesting findings are the second-order correlations:

- Overall score correlates with technical foundation at 0.944. Sites that block cr
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- [What Is GEO? The Definitive Guide to Generative Engine Optimization (2026)20 min](/blog/what-is-geo-2026-definitive)
- [Best GEO Audit Tools 2026: 6 Compared With Pricing & Verdicts16 min](/blog/best-geo-audit-tools-compared-geoxylia-semrush-ahrefs)
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