How I Built a Free GEO Checker That Scores Your Website's AI Search Visibility

fsakbas — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:10:06 +0000

TL;DR: I built EchoRank — a free toolkit for checking how visible your website is to AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Here's what I learned building the GEO Checker, what signals actually matter, and why traditional SEO is no longer enough.

The problem I kept running into

A client came to me with a familiar complaint: their Google rankings were fine — top 3 for most of their target keywords. But their sales team was noticing something strange. Prospects were saying "I asked ChatGPT about [product category] and you weren't mentioned."

I started digging. Turns out, ranking on Google doesn't automatically mean you get cited by AI search engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini pull from a different set of signals — schema markup, semantic structure, citation patterns, authority in their training data — and many well-ranked sites are essentially invisible there.

I couldn't find a tool that measured this. So I built one.

What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization — the practice of optimizing your content so AI-powered answer engines cite, quote, and reference your site.

Traditional SEO optimizes for: keyword density, backlinks, page speed, Core Web Vitals.

GEO optimizes for:

Semantic clarity — Is your content unambiguous enough for an LLM to extract facts from?
Structured data — Do you have JSON-LD schema that AI crawlers can parse?
Citation authority — Are other authoritative sources already referencing you?
llms.txt — Have you published a machine-readable summary of your content for AI engines?
E-E-A-T signals — Author credentials, organizational trust signals, sourced claims
Answer-shaped content — Does your content directly answer questions, or just rank for them?

Building the GEO Checker: technical deep dive

The GEO Checker runs a multi-layer analysis on any URL. Here's how it works under the hood.

Stack

Next.js 15 App Router — server components for the page, client component for the form UI
TypeScript — everything is typed, especially the CheckResult and ToolScanResult types
postgres.js — lightweight Postgres client connected to a pgvector-enabled Postgres 18 instance
Tailwind CSS v4 + shadcn/ui — UI components

What checks does it run?

The GEO Checker evaluates 12+ signals across 4 categories:

1. Structured Data (Schema.org)

Detects JSON-LD presence and type (Article, Organization, FAQPage, HowTo, etc.)
FAQPage and HowTo schemas are especially valuable
Validates that structured data is parseable

2. Content Semantics

Heading hierarchy analysis
Presence of direct-answer patterns
Paragraph length distribution
Internal link anchor text quality

3. AI Crawler Signals

robots.txt analysis — are GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot blocked?
llms.txt detection
Open Graph and Twitter Card completeness
Canonical tag presence

4. Authority & Trust Signals

HTTPS enforcement
Author markup
Organization schema with sameAs links
Date freshness signals

What I learned from thousands of scans

Most commonly missing signals:

llms.txt — less than 2% of sites have it
Author schema — missing on ~80% of blog posts
FAQPage markup — used by <5% of content sites
dateModified — sites update content but don't update the schema date

The highest-impact single change: Adding FAQPage JSON-LD to existing content. AI engines love structured Q&A pairs — they map directly to the format AI answers are generated in.

Try it free

All tools on EchoRank are free to use:

GEO Checker — AI search visibility score
llms.txt Generator — Auto-generate your AI content summary
AI Citation Gap Analyzer — See where your brand is missing from AI answers
Agentic UX Auditor — Grade your site's readiness for AI agents
ROI & PPC Calculator — SEO and paid campaign ROI simulator

Happy to answer questions about the data or technical implementation in the comments!

DEV Community: fsakbas