TL;DR — Check the category distribution of top actions in Strategy > Actions to diagnose which lever is your current bottleneck: Technical, Content, or Citation. Go to Technical > Technical Analysis first — if the audit score is below 60, fix crawlability before investing in content or links. Use Analytics > Page Performance to confirm the root cause per page: crawled but not cited means content quality, cited but not crawled elsewhere means technical. Pro tip: the most common single fix with the highest ROI is unblocking AI crawlers in robots.txt — one change can unlock visibility across every topic simultaneously.
The Question
“How do I prioritize between fixing citations, creating content, and technical SEO?”GEO improvement has three distinct levers: earning more citations (getting authoritative sources to mention or link to you), creating new content (filling topic gaps where AI models have nothing to cite), and fixing technical issues (making your existing content accessible and interpretable by AI crawlers). Each lever addresses a different root cause, and spending effort on the wrong one first is the most common GEO execution mistake. This page shows you how to diagnose which lever has the highest marginal impact for your brand right now. You might also be wondering:
- “My technical audit is clean — should I focus on content or citations next?”
- “I have great content but no citations — is that a content quality problem or a distribution problem?”
- “How do I know if my visibility problem is caused by crawlability vs content authority?”
Where to Go in Qwairy
Start here: Strategy > Actions — Category Breakdown
Navigate to Strategy > Actions and use the category filter to see the distribution of identified actions across the three categories: Technical, Content, and Citation/Backlink.
The category with the most high-impact actions is your first lever. If Technical actions dominate the top of the impact-sorted list, it means crawlability or structural issues are preventing your existing content from being evaluated — fixing these is a prerequisite for content and citation investments to pay off. If Content actions dominate, your content coverage is the bottleneck. If Citation actions dominate, your content exists and is accessible but lacks the external authority signals that AI models need to trust it as a source.
The category balance of the top 10 actions gives you a clear diagnostic: fix the foundation (technical) before investing in distribution (citations) before creating new content for gaps (content).
Go deeper: Specific Diagnosis Per Category
For the Technical category: open Technical > Technical Analysis to get the detailed audit score. If the audit score is below 70 and the audit flags issues like AI crawler blocking, missing structured data, slow page speed, or broken sitemaps — this is your first priority. Technical issues create a ceiling on how effective any other GEO investment can be.
For the Content category: open Strategy > Content Opportunities and note the severity scores. High severity means a topic gap that AI models encounter frequently with no good source to cite. These gaps are your most cost-effective content investments.
For the Citation category: open Strategy > Backlinks (Backlink Opportunities) and review the domain authority and topic relevance scores. High-authority domains that are already citing your competitors are your first citation targets — they are proven AI citation sources in your category.
Complete the picture: Analytics > Page Performance
Use Analytics > Page Performance as the diagnostic tool that ties the three categories together.
A page that shows high crawler visit frequency but zero citations has a content quality problem — it is technically accessible and crawlable, but AI models are evaluating it and not choosing to use it as a source. This confirms: technical is not the bottleneck; content quality or citation authority is.
A page that has citations from one provider but zero crawler visits from others has a crawl access problem — specific AI bots are not finding or indexing the page. This points to a technical issue even if the overall technical audit score is decent.
A page that is never crawled and has no citations may have either a crawl blocking problem (technical) or simply be too new or too low-authority to attract crawlers (content/citation combined problem).
What to Look For
Actions — The Three-Category Diagnostic
The single most important input is the distribution of high-impact actions across the three categories. This distribution reflects Qwairy’s assessment of which root cause is currently limiting your AI visibility growth.| Category | Root cause | First signal |
|---|---|---|
| Technical | AI crawlers cannot access or correctly interpret your content | High crawler visit frequency with zero or few citations |
| Content | AI models encounter queries in your category but have no quality source to cite | Query Fan-Out showing unsourced gaps in your topic areas |
| Citation/Backlink | Content exists and is accessible but lacks the external authority signals AI models require | Pages crawled frequently, occasionally cited, but cite rate is low vs page quality |
Technical Analysis — The Score Threshold
Technical Analysis produces a score from 0–100. Treat it as a prerequisite check:- Score 80–100: Technical issues are not your primary bottleneck. Focus on Content and Citations.
- Score 60–79: Technical issues are moderately constraining. Fix critical issues (AI crawler blocking, sitemap errors) before scaling content investment.
- Score below 60: Technical issues are a primary bottleneck. Content and citation investments will show limited return until the foundation is fixed.
Pro Tip: The most common technical issue that suppresses AI citations is robots.txt blocking AI-specific crawlers while allowing standard web crawlers. Many sites that correctly allow Googlebot and Bingbot accidentally block GPTBot, PerplexityBot, or ClaudeBot. A single robots.txt fix can unlock AI visibility across every topic and provider simultaneously — this is why technical issues often have the highest marginal impact per hour of effort invested.
Filters That Help
| Filter | How to use it for this question |
|---|---|
| Action category | Isolate one category to build a focused sprint list for the team that owns it |
| Effort (Low/Medium/High) | For the content category, filter to Medium effort to find achievable content pieces vs long-form guides |
| Topic | Focus the diagnosis on your highest-value business topic to determine which lever is blocking that specific area |
How to Interpret the Results
Good result
Technical Analysis scores above 80 and the top actions are Citation and Content actions — your foundation is solid and the remaining work is authority-building and coverage expansion. Content Opportunities shows well-defined gaps (not a vague “create more content” suggestion but specific, query-level gaps). Backlinks shows actionable domain targets with medium authority and clear topic relevance. You have a clear decision: invest in 2–3 targeted content pieces and 1–2 citation campaigns before reassessing.Needs attention
Technical Analysis below 60 while the team has been investing heavily in content — this is the worst allocation mismatch. Good content exists but it is not being crawled or evaluated by AI models. All content investment prior to fixing the technical foundation has partially wasted ROI. Or: Content Opportunities is empty (no gaps found) and Backlinks shows no high-authority citation targets — this indicates a highly competitive category where incremental improvements are marginal and a differentiated positioning or authority strategy is needed rather than tactical GEO optimization.Example
Scenario: A legal services firm with 12 practice areas has invested 6 months creating 25 in-depth practice area guides and client alert articles targeting AI visibility, but citation rates have barely moved. They want to understand why their content investment is not paying off.
- Open Strategy > Actions filtered to Technical. The top 3 technical actions all concern the same root cause: the firm’s
/insights/subdirectory (where all practice area guides live) is disallowed in robots.txt for GPTBot and ClaudeBot. The IT team added the block to prevent AI models from training on the firm’s legal analysis, but it also prevents those pages from being cited as sources in AI-generated answers. - Confirm in Analytics > Crawler Analytics: zero GPTBot visits to any insights URL. PerplexityBot visits are normal because PerplexityBot uses a different user-agent string not covered by the block. This explains why Perplexity shows moderate brand visibility for legal queries while ChatGPT shows near-zero — ChatGPT’s crawler has been blocked from the firm’s most authoritative content.
- Technical > Technical Analysis score: 51. The robots.txt issue accounts for 24 points of the score deduction. Additional flags: no FAQ schema on the practice area pages and missing Organization schema on the firm’s homepage.
- After a review with the firm’s managing partner, update the robots.txt rule to allow GPTBot on
/insights/. Within 3 weeks, GPTBot begins crawling the practice area guides. Within 6 weeks, ChatGPT citation rates begin rising — the “employment law guide” and “M&A due diligence checklist” are the first pages cited, confirming that the high-quality content that was already there needed only technical access to generate AI citations.
Go Further
Export the prioritized action breakdown
Export citation, content, and technical priorities as separate CSV files for each team’s workflow
Citation progress tracker
Track citation acquisition progress over time in Looker Studio using the source-urls data source
Technical readiness audit
Read the Technical Analysis documentation to run a full AI readiness audit on your site’s technical setup
Related Questions
What are the highest-priority actions overall?
Get the full prioritized action list before splitting it by category
What quick wins can I achieve this month?
Filter to low-effort actions across all three categories for fast results
How do I get AI models to cite my content more?
Deep dive into the citation-building lever with specific tactics