We Rebuilt the GEO Audit From Scratch. Here's Why.

When we launched our first GEO tools, the Domain Audit and URL Audit, they were a starting point. A way for marketing teams to get a quick read on how to improve on-page signals and content to perform in AI search.

They worked. But “worked” isn’t good enough when AI search is changing this fast.

Over the past few months, we’ve been digging into what actually helps brands improve their website visibility on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other AI engines. Not what sounds like it should work. What actually moves the needle.

The answer came down to three fundamentals. So we rebuilt the entire GEO Audit around them.

What’s new

The legacy Domain and URL Audit tools are being replaced by two new tools: a GEO Crawlability Checker and a Content Checker.

Together, they evaluate your pages against the three on-page factors that determine whether AI engines can find, understand, and reference your content.

Let’s start with Crawlabililty.

Crawlability Checker

As the name suggests, the Crawlability Checker analyzes if AI search engines can access and crawl a specific URL. The Crawlability Checker verifies both firewall permissions as well as robots.txt settings, and provides you with an overview which Bots do have access, and which don’t.

Content Checker

The Content Checker is focused on your content, or any content on any URL really. The neat thing? You can choose a crawler identity to see how different AI crawlers see, scan and understand your content.

The Content Checker from the GEO Audit is based on 3 core metrics: Static Content, AI Readiness and Structured Data.

1. Static Content

Here’s something most teams don’t realize: heavy JavaScript and dynamic content can make your content invisible to AI bots. Traditional search engines have gotten good at rendering JavaScript. AI crawlers haven’t caught up.

If your page relies on client-side rendering to load key content, there’s a real chance AI engines aren’t seeing it at all. The new audit flags this immediately and tells you exactly where the gaps are.

2. AI Readiness

Can AI engines actually crawl your content and reference it in their responses? That’s a different question than whether Google can index it.

We developed a dedicated scoring system for this. It evaluates how well your content is structured for AI consumption – not just search engine indexing – and gives you specific recommendations to improve it. No vague suggestions. Concrete actions.

3. Structured Data

How well-organized is your HTML and content structure? Structured data has always mattered for traditional SEO, but it plays a different role in AI search. AI engines use structured data to understand context, relationships, and meaning — the building blocks of a well-formed answer.

We doubled down on our structured data checker and built a dedicated score for it. You’ll see exactly where your markup is strong and where it’s falling short.

Best of all? You can download every single GEO Audit and share it with your team! Just hit the download button.

Why we made these changes

The honest answer: we learned that our original tools weren’t focused on the right things. Yes, AI Bots are crawling LLMs.txt files, but is it helping your AI search visibility? We haven’t seen (big) impacts like these, which is why we are removing the LLMs.txt checker in our new GEO tool.

After analyzing millions of website citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, we kept seeing the same patterns. The brands that consistently showed up in AI responses weren’t just doing traditional SEO well. They had content that was technically accessible to AI crawlers, structured in ways AI engines could parse, and written in a format that lent itself to being referenced in answers.

That’s what the new GEO Audit measures. Three scores, three fundamentals, one clear picture of your AI search readiness.

What happens to the legacy tools?

Until March 19 2026, you can still access the old legacy tools in your OtterlyAI account and view the results of your previous audits. After March 19, those legacy tools (domain and URL audit) will be removed from the product. The new Crawlability Checker and Content Checker cover everything they did – and go deeper on what actually impacts AI visibility.