GEO guides
How to choose a generative engine optimization (GEO) tool
A good GEO tool tells you why AI systems can or cannot use your site and what to fix first. A weak one sells a dashboard full of numbers nobody can verify. Here is how to tell them apart.
By Geolytic team · · 3 min read
What a GEO tool is for
Generative engine optimization is the work of making your site easy for AI systems to read, trust and quote. A GEO tool supports that work by collecting evidence about your pages and turning it into a short list of fixes. If the idea is new, start with our introduction to GEO.
The key word is evidence. AI answers change by user, by location and by day. Any tool that hands you a single permanent ranking inside ChatGPT is simplifying reality so much that the number stops meaning anything.
The checks that matter most
1. Crawler access
If an AI search crawler cannot fetch a page, nothing else matters. A useful tool reads your robots.txt and reports the rules for crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot. It should also separate search crawlers from training crawlers such as GPTBot, because blocking training is a valid business choice. Our AI crawler robots.txt guide explains the difference.
2. Readable content in the HTML
Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. A tool should fetch the raw HTML and confirm that headings, body text and links are present before scripts load. Pages that render only in the browser often look empty to these systems.
3. Structured data
Schema markup such as Organization, Product, Article or FAQPage helps machines connect facts to the right entity. The tool should list what JSON-LD exists on each page and flag invalid or missing types, not just award points for having any markup at all.
4. Business clarity
AI systems answer questions like who does this company serve and what does it cost. A GEO tool should check whether your pages state your offer, audience, location and pricing in plain words that can be quoted.
5. Technical health
Broken links, slow responses, duplicate titles and missing canonical tags hurt classic search and AI retrieval alike. A complete tool covers these too, which is why we pair GEO checks with a technical SEO audit.
Claims to treat with caution
- A visibility percentage with no explanation of which questions were asked or which model answered.
- Live ranking positions inside the consumer ChatGPT or Claude apps. Those sessions are personalised and not available through any official feed.
- Sentiment or share of voice scores when the tool cannot show the underlying answers.
- Guaranteed citations. No vendor controls what an AI model chooses to quote.
Readiness checks versus answer tracking
There are two honest ways to measure GEO. Readiness checks look at your site and tell you whether it is easy to use as a source. Answer tracking asks real questions through official model APIs and records whether your brand appears. Both are useful. Readiness tells you what to fix. Answer tracking tells you whether the fixes are moving anything over time.
Geolytic does both. The free audit covers readiness. Paid plans add AI answer checks that send your saved buyer questions to Gemini, OpenAI and Claude through their official APIs and store each answer so you can read it yourself. These are API answers, not screenshots of the consumer apps. We say so in every report.
A simple way to compare tools
- Run the same site through each tool you are considering.
- Pick three findings from each report and check them by hand.
- Ask each vendor where every number comes from.
- Keep the tool whose findings you could verify. Drop the one whose numbers you could not explain to a client.
Try it on your own site
You can run a free GEO audit on up to five pages and see every finding with the page it came from. If you work at an agency, the Pitch Audit gives you a quick three page scan to open a sales conversation. See pricing for AI answer checks and larger crawls.
See how your site looks to AI search
Free scan of up to 5 pages. Sign in to view the full report.