# What does the GEO MarketMap site check read, and how does it judge a page?

The check reads your site the way an assistant's crawler does: robots.txt, the sitemap and llms.txt first, then the home page and up to 11 more pages chosen by kind, then the home page's speed on a phone and a desktop. Each page is judged as the kind of page it is, so an article is asked for an author and a date and a product page is not. Findings land in 3 bands: stopping you appearing, worth fixing, already fine.

## What exactly is read?

| Stage | Reads | What it tells |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Root files | robots.txt, the sitemap and up to 5 of its children, llms.txt | Who may crawl, how big and how fresh the site says it is, whether the assistants' crawlers are allowed. |
| Home page | The page as a browser renders it, and its markup | Words, structured data, the answer in the opening, the organisation's identity. |
| The sample | Up to 11 more pages, chosen by kind: product pages, articles, the blog index, pricing, about, help | Per-kind findings: bylines and dates on articles, Product markup on product pages, internal links, depth. |
| Speed | The home page on a phone and on a desktop | The dial on the Health tab; a slow page is a finding, not a gate. |

12 pages in all, and the first line of the tab says which: "Read 12 pages: the home page, 4 product pages, 3 articles". The check follows up to 30 of the pages' own links and reads the sitemap against robots.txt, following the conventions at [robotstxt.org](https://www.robotstxt.org).

## What is the difference between a gate and a finding?

A gate is 1 of 6 conditions that stop the site being read at all: the assistants' crawlers blocked, the site not answering, the home page empty of text, and the like. Everything else is a finding, ranked by the cost of not acting, with the pages it is about listed under it and a line saying whose morning it belongs in: the writer's or the developer's. Severity is how loud a finding is; whether it blocks is a separate question, and a broken structured-data block on 1 page is worth fixing, not a gate.

> Never scold: say the consequence for being quoted by an assistant and let the owner decide.
> 
> the rule every sentence the check writes is held to

## Why is an article judged differently from a product page?

Because the questions an assistant asks of them differ. Authorship, publication dates and cited sources are asked only of pages that read as editorial: Article markup, a readable date, a byline, an editorial path such as /blog. A brochure site gets 1 line saying no articles were among the pages read, and the organisation's identity finding is the one that applies. The kinds are listed in the [site check feature page](https://www.geomarketmap.com/features/site-health), and the structured data the check looks for follows [schema.org](https://schema.org/Article).

## When should I run it again?

Nothing re-runs by itself. The Health tab shows an "Out of date" badge after 30 days, and the agent offers "Check my site again" after 30 days or once 50 pieces have been published since the last check. The re-check is free; "Read the whole site" is offered while the project has only ever had the 12-page sample. A finding you fixed is seen fixed on the next check, and the tab says how.

## Does the check change anything on my site?

No. It reads public pages only, exactly as a crawler would. Every fix is yours to make, and the developer's items arrive as a brief you can hand over.

## Why was a page I care about not read?

The sample is 12 pages chosen by kind, so that every kind the site has is represented. "Read the whole site" reads beyond the sample, and a re-check reads a fresh sample.

## Read next

- [What happens in the first hour with GEO MarketMap?](https://www.geomarketmap.com/docs/first-project)
- [How do I publish a draft written by GEO MarketMap?](https://www.geomarketmap.com/docs/publish-a-draft)
- [How should an AI assistant or crawler read geomarketmap.com?](https://www.geomarketmap.com/docs/for-ai-assistants)

Last updated 15 September 2026. Source: https://www.geomarketmap.com/docs/site-check