Content Quality & Compliance Scorecard
100-Point System: evaluate content before publication on two axes — GEO writing quality (the 12 research-graded techniques plus the methodology's content-layer principles) and compliance (substantiation, classification, endorsements, reviews, AI disclosure, and policy accuracy)
Pre-Publication Checklist from the Three Streams GEO Methodology, Foundations §6.8
How This Tool Works
Use this checklist to evaluate informational (spoke) content before publication. The 20 checks are organized in five steps, each with its own category score: three for writing quality (Content & Evidence, Structure & Entity, Trust & Freshness), one for the methodology's content-layer principles (Principles & Handoffs), and one for compliance — six checks covering substantiation, claim classification, endorsements, review integrity, AI disclosure, and policy accuracy. Each check carries a tier label: writing tiers grade GEO evidence (Measured / Correlational / Principle); the Regulatory tier marks legal doctrine, not optional optimization. If a check genuinely does not apply to the piece (a how-to with no comparison tables, a guide with no reviews), mark it N/A — it is removed from the denominator instead of dragging the score.
Measured — a peer-reviewed GEO experiment reported a citation lift
Correlational — associated with citation in a 2026 study, not causally proven
Principle — grounded in retrieval mechanics, not isolated in a GEO test
Educational Use Only: this tool is for learning and self-assessment. Scoring weights represent one implementation model—organizations should calibrate to their context. Results help diagnose content readiness but do not guarantee AI citation outcomes.
Total Score
0/100
Content readiness
Percentage
0%
Of maximum
Items Checked
0/72
Criteria met
Poor (<50%)
Fair (50-74%)
Good (75-89%)
Excellent (90%+)
Begin Evaluation
Check criteria below
Compliance Gate — Substantiation & Disclosure
Hard gate · not a score
Four criteria in the compliance category are critical: every numbered claim traces to a primary record, policy claims match the actual current policy, no fabricated or AI-generated reviews, and material connections disclosed. A page can score 90%+ on writing technique and still be unpublishable — this gate makes that explicit. Marking a check N/A (a piece with no reviews, no endorsements) releases its critical criterion.
Grounded in FTC Act §5 substantiation doctrine and the FTC endorsement and consumer-review rules. This is workflow guidance, not legal advice — regulated categories need qualified review.
Beyond the page
A single piece of content cannot earn citations on writing alone. This is the Interdependence Principle — the first of the methodology's Five Core Principles — and it has empirical teeth: SAGEO Arena (arXiv:2602.12187, Feb 2026) found that content-only optimization can even reduce retrieval in a full RAG pipeline unless paired with structure and off-page authority. This scorecard covers the Content stream; structural readiness (semantic HTML, structured data, metadata) is scored separately in the GEO-16 Content Scorecard — the content-side GEO-16 pillars (headings, freshness, author, evidence, internal linking) are already folded into the checks above, so nothing here is double-counted, and the Business stream (earned media, reviews, third-party mentions) has no checklist here because no on-page edit can produce it. Pair all three — see Stream Foundations.