Yes, and no. The audit runs without a sign-up, without a credit card, and without a tracking script. We crawl your public pages once with our self-identifying bot and show you what we measured. Nothing is written to your site and nothing is changed.

We ask the engines real questions and record which sources they return. A citation is only counted when the engine itself returns your site as a source. We never infer a citation, and we never count a brand name appearing in text as a citation, because the question we asked often contains the brand name in the first place.

A traditional SEO tool tells you where you rank in a list of links. That is still useful, and we measure it. What it cannot tell you is whether an AI assistant named you when someone asked it what to buy, because that answer produces no ranking, no impression and no click. We measure both, and we keep them separate rather than blending them into one number.

SEO is about ranking in a list of blue links. AI visibility is about whether an answer engine like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity reads your site, trusts it, and cites it in its answer. The two overlap but are not the same: a page can rank well on Google and still never be quoted by an AI. We measure both, and we tell you which signal moves which.

Often the culprit is your robots.txt. Sites frequently block the AI crawlers by name (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) without realizing it, and a blocked crawler can never read your pages, so that engine can never cite you. Our free audit checks each of those crawlers against your robots.txt and shows you exactly which are allowed and which are blocked. It is the first thing worth ruling out.

Every number we show can be opened. Click it and you see the observations behind it, the evidence we recorded, the confidence, and the source. When we have not measured something, we say so instead of filling the gap with an estimate. Most tools quietly estimate and present the result as fact.

No. Alongside the findings we give you ready-made prompts built from your own results. Copy one, paste it into whatever AI you already use, and it will tell you exactly what to change and where. If you would rather not do that, our AI can write the developer-ready plan for you on a paid plan.

Two different measurements, and we keep them separate. Citations are measured live on Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Crawler access, which is whether an engine can reach your pages at all, is measured for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. So we can tell you today whether ChatGPT can read you; we do not yet claim to know whether it cites you, and we label every cell accordingly rather than implying full coverage.

Reading is access: the engine's crawler is permitted to fetch your pages, which you control in robots.txt. Citing is the outcome: the engine returns your page as a source in an answer it gives a real person. Reading is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. A site can be fully readable by every AI crawler and never be cited once, and a blocked crawler guarantees zero citations no matter how good the page is. We measure both separately and never blend them into one score.

Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of getting your content quoted inside AI-generated answers, rather than ranked in a list of links. In practice it means being reachable by AI crawlers, being structured so a passage can be lifted cleanly, and being the kind of source an engine treats as authoritative. We measure the inputs to it and specify the work. We do not perform the publishing, and we do not promise a citation, because nobody can honestly sell that.

AI referral traffic is visitors who arrive on your site by clicking a link inside an AI assistant's answer. It is measurable with SEOAIO Tracking, an optional first-party script that records which engine referred each visit, which page they landed on, and whether they converted. One limitation we state plainly: a click from a Google AI Overview arrives with the same google.com referrer as an ordinary organic click, so it cannot be separated from organic search, and we do not guess at it.

Never. We only read your public pages. We do not need DNS access, we do not post links anywhere on your behalf, and we do not generate fake citations or backlinks. Everything we recommend is a change you choose to make on your own site. There is one optional script, SEOAIO Tracking, which measures which AI engines send you real visitors. It is opt-in, you install it yourself, it sets no cookies and stores no personal data, and everything else works without it.

Because we refuse to average our way to a number. Your Visibility Score is made of seven pillars, and we hold the overall figure until enough of them are genuinely measured. A three-of-seven average is not an overall score. It unlocks as evidence arrives, not when marketing would like it to.