Common questions, plain-English answers

When someone types a question into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews, those engines don’t just retrieve links — they generate a synthesised answer with sources. AI visibility measures whether your site appears as one of those sources.

Unlike traditional SEO (rank #1 and users click your link), AI search shows the user an answer directly — often without them ever visiting your site. Being cited inside that answer is what GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is about.

The free Readiness score measures six technical signals on your public page — each one a known prerequisite for being cited in AI answers:

1. AI Crawler Access— whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude’s crawlers are allowed in your robots.txt
2. Structured Data — JSON-LD schema markup (especially FAQPage) that lets AI engines parse your content as facts
3. Extractability — how easily an AI can pull a direct answer from your page (clear headings, answer-first writing, FAQ format)
4. Authority Signals — statistics, citations, and outbound links to authoritative sources
5. Freshness — whether your page signals how recent it is (datePublished, sitemap lastmod, etc.)
6. Technical Health — HTTPS, a valid 200 status, and not depending entirely on JavaScript to render content

Each engine (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude) weights these signals differently. We compute a score for each, then average them. Full methodology here.

It means one of two things — or both:

• Your page isn’t indexed where ChatGPT looks. ChatGPT Search pulls 87% of its citations from Bing’s top results. If your site doesn’t rank well on Bing, or if you’ve blocked the OAI-SearchBot crawler in robots.txt, you’re effectively invisible to ChatGPT.
• Your page doesn’t answer the query clearly enough. AI engines favour pages that give a direct, clearly structured answer in the first third of the content. If your answer is buried, a competitor’s cleaner page wins.

Start with the free audit — it will tell you exactly which signals are missing and which to fix first.

Often yes, because many of the same signals matter: clear content structure, authority, freshness, and good technical health. But the relationship isn’t one-to-one. ChatGPT uses Bing’s index (not Google’s), and Perplexity runs its own crawler. A site can rank well in Google but be nearly invisible to ChatGPT, and vice versa. GEO Tool measures the AI-specific signals that traditional SEO tools miss.

It depends on the engine and the query. Studies show AI referral traffic converts at 5–14× the rate of traditional Google organic traffic — meaning the visitors who do click are much more likely to become customers. But total AI referral volume is still under 1% of web traffic, and AI engines increasingly answer in-UI without generating a click at all.

Think of AI visibility as a quality signal and a trust-building channel — not a direct traffic replacement. Being cited builds brand credibility with buyers who are actively researching, even if they don’t click through immediately.

• 80–100Highly visible. Strong signals across the board. You're well-positioned for AI citation.
• 60–79Getting noticed. Good foundations but meaningful gaps — fixes here will have real impact.
• 40–59Partially visible. Mixed signals. AI engines may find you for some queries but miss you for others.
• 20–39Mostly invisible. Several critical signals are missing. You're unlikely to appear in AI answers.
• 0–19Invisible to AI. Fundamental issues — likely a crawler block, JS-only rendering, or missing indexing.

The score is a readiness estimate, not a guarantee. A score of 90 means your page has the right technical signals — it doesn’t guarantee you’ll be cited. Off-site factors (Reddit mentions, review profiles, brand authority) also matter and can’t be measured from your page alone.

Each engine has a genuinely different retrieval architecture. ChatGPT relies heavily on Bing indexing and crawler access. Perplexity weights freshness and factual density most. Gemini follows Google’s E-E-A-T signals and structured data. Claude is the most selective — it strongly favours well-structured, clearly authoritative content. A page optimised for one engine won’t automatically score well on all four.

If you made changes to your page (content, robots.txt, structured data, technical setup), the score should reflect those changes. If you changed nothing, a different score may mean the audit fetched a cached or slightly different version of your page. AI visibility is also genuinely volatile — AI engines update their models and retrieval stacks continuously, sometimes without announcement. We show the audit date on every result; scores older than 30 days may not reflect current engine behaviour.

Competitor Share-of-Voice comparison is available on paid plans. You can see which competitors are appearing in AI answers for the same buyer queries — and by how much. That’s typically the most actionable data, because “I’m at 8% and my competitor is at 70%” is a clearer call to action than an absolute score.

The free audit gives you:

• A full Readiness score (0–100) with a per-engine breakdown
• An analysis of all six readiness signals with specific issues flagged
• A plain-English explanation of each issue and why it matters
• A shareable results link you can send to your team or an agency

The free audit requires no signup and runs in under 30 seconds. It measures the deterministic technical signals on your page — no AI API calls, no waitlist.

Paid plans unlock:

• Measured Visibility — live queries sent to the actual AI engines to check if your brand appears in real answers (not just a technical readiness estimate)
• Competitor Share-of-Voice — who is appearing instead of you, and by how much
• Change alerts — email notifications when your visibility drops, a competitor overtakes you, or AI starts describing your brand inaccurately
• Audit history — track your score over time so you can see if your improvements are working
• More queries and engines — deeper measurement across more query types and all four major engines

See the pricing page for the full plan breakdown.

Credits are used for Measured Visibility audits — the paid feature that sends live queries to AI engines. Each credit covers one measured audit (a set of real queries sent across multiple engines). Readiness audits (the free score) do not use credits. Credits are included in monthly plans and can also be purchased as top-ups if you need to run extra audits beyond your plan limit.

No. The free Readiness audit requires no signup, no email, and no credit card. Just enter your URL and your score is ready in under 30 seconds. You can share the results page with anyone.

The free audit fetches your public URL exactly as an AI crawler would — no login, no private data, no authentication. We only analyse what is publicly accessible.

For paid accounts, your audit history and domain data are tied to your account and are not shared with other users or sold to third parties. We do not use your audit data to train AI models.

For a free audit, we fetch your page’s public HTML, robots.txt, and sitemap (if available). We store the parsed signals and your score to generate the results page. For the free audit without signup, this data is retained only long enough to serve the results link. If you create an account, your audit history is retained in your account.

No. We fetch your page as a crawler would — without authentication. This is the same constraint that real AI crawlers face. If your content is behind a login or loaded entirely by JavaScript without server rendering, AI engines (and our audit) will see very little. This is worth fixing regardless of our tool.

After making changes to your page (content, structured data, robots.txt, technical fixes), re-run the free audit to confirm the signal is now present. The Readiness score is deterministic — it reflects the current state of your public page, so changes show up immediately.

For ongoing monitoring of actualAI citation (Measured Visibility), a monthly check is reasonable for most businesses. Weekly monitoring makes sense if you’re in a competitive category or have recently made significant content changes. Change alerts on paid plans handle this automatically — you’ll be notified when something meaningful shifts, so you don’t have to remember to log in.

The highest-impact fixes, roughly in order:

1. Unblock AI crawlers.If GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot are blocked in your robots.txt, you’re categorically excluded from those engines regardless of content quality. Fix this first.
2. Get indexed on Bing.87% of ChatGPT Search citations come from Bing’s top results. If you’re not indexing well on Bing, you’re likely invisible to ChatGPT Search.
3. Add FAQPage structured data. FAQ schema shows the strongest correlation with AI citation of any on-page technical signal. It helps AI engines parse your content as structured answers.
4. Write answer-first content.AI engines pull from the first third of your page most often. If your key answer is buried in paragraph 8, a competitor’s cleaner page wins.
5. Add statistics and cite your sources. Research shows pages with statistics and in-text citations are cited 41% more often. Add data points with sources to your key pages.
6. Add freshness signals. Especially for Perplexity, which filters aggressively for recency — add datePublished and dateModified to your JSON-LD and keep your sitemap lastmod current.

The audit shows exactly which of these are missing for your specific page and scores each by impact.

A high Readiness score means your page has the right technical prerequisites — it doesn’t guarantee you’ll be cited. Several factors can’t be measured from your page alone:

• Off-site authority: brand mentions across the web, Reddit presence, review-site profiles (G2, Trustpilot, Capterra), and whether AI engines recognise your brand as an entity (Wikipedia/Wikidata)
• Query competitiveness: for high-volume queries, dozens of authoritative sites compete to be cited — even perfect on-page signals may not be enough
• Content relevance: your page may score well technically but not directly answer the queries real users are asking

Measured Visibility (the paid feature) will show you whether and how often you actually appear in live AI answers for your specific category queries — and which competitors are appearing instead.