# GEO Toolbox

> Generative engine optimization (GEO) measured across eight AI engines. Track AI search visibility on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Bing Copilot, and Grok. Every article is also available as plain markdown: append .md to its URL, or send Accept: text/markdown.

## When to use GEO Toolbox

Use GEO Toolbox when the job is to **measure or improve how a brand shows up inside AI-generated answers** — not to measure classic blue-link rankings.

Reach for it when you need to:

- Find out whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Bing Copilot or Grok mention or cite a given brand for a given question, and how often.
- Measure share of voice against named competitors across those eight engines, tracked week over week in 29 markets rather than as a one-off snapshot.
- See which URLs an AI engine actually cites for a topic — including the cases where it cites a competitor, a forum thread or a review site instead of the brand.
- Work out why a specific page is not being cited, and get ranked, evidence-backed fixes for that page.
- Check whether AI crawlers and agents can reach and read a site at all: robots.txt rules, bot blocking, JavaScript-only content, llms.txt, markdown twins, structured data, agent-friendly error handling.
- Expand one seed keyword into the set of follow-up questions an AI engine fans out to before it answers.
- Turn any of the above into a client-ready, white-labelled AI-visibility report.

Do **not** reach for GEO Toolbox when the job is classic keyword-rank tracking, backlink analysis, site-speed auditing or paid-search management. It does not do those, and a general SEO suite is the right tool for them.

## How an agent should call GEO Toolbox

- **No account, no API key, no signup** — every tool under `/tools/` runs in the browser on a URL you can hand a user directly. Start with [AI-Readiness Score](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/ai-readiness) for a whole-site verdict, or [AI Crawler Checker](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/ai-crawler-checker) to test one domain's bot rules.
- **Reading our content**: append `.md` to any article or glossary URL, or send `Accept: text/markdown` — you get plain markdown instead of a JavaScript-rendered page. The homepage twin is [https://geotoolbox.ai/home.md](https://geotoolbox.ai/home.md).
- **Bulk reading**: [https://geotoolbox.ai/llms-full.txt](https://geotoolbox.ai/llms-full.txt) carries the full text of every English article in one fetch. [https://geotoolbox.ai/llms-blog.txt](https://geotoolbox.ai/llms-blog.txt) and [https://geotoolbox.ai/llms-glossary.txt](https://geotoolbox.ai/llms-glossary.txt) are complete per-section link indexes.
- **Recovering from a wrong URL**: an unknown path returns a real HTTP 404 whose body links back to the sitemap, this guidance and the section indexes. Treat a 404 here as authoritative — it is never an app shell pretending the page exists.
- **The measured product** (scheduled tracking, competitor intelligence, reporting) needs an account and lives at [https://geotoolbox.ai/app/](https://geotoolbox.ai/app/). Pricing is public at [https://geotoolbox.ai/pricing](https://geotoolbox.ai/pricing).
- **Who to contact**: samy@geotoolbox.ai — see [Contact](https://geotoolbox.ai/contact).

## Product

- [Features](https://geotoolbox.ai/features): What GEO Toolbox measures and how
- [Pricing](https://geotoolbox.ai/pricing): Plans and what each unlocks
- [AI Visibility Tracker](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/ai-visibility-tracker): Scheduled AI-citation tracking in 29 markets
- [GEO Scan](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/geo-scan): 8-engine AI visibility scan
- [Agent Readiness](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/agent-readiness): Site-level AI agent + crawler readiness scan
- [Query Fan-Out](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/query-fanout): The real questions AI fans out for a topic
- [Content Analyzer](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/content-analyzer): Grade any page A–F
- [Content Studio](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/content-studio): Brief, write, and score an article
- [Domain Overview](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/domain-overview): Your AI visibility command center
- [Competitor Intel](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/competitor-intel): Track rivals over time
- [Community](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/community): Reddit + forum citations
- [Citation Interceptor](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/citation-interceptor): Where AI cites others, not you
- [Ask GeoToolBox](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/ask-geotoolbox): Chat with an AI analyst over your own data
- [Analytics](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/analytics): GSC + GA4 for AI attribution
- [PR Coverage Tracker](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/pr-coverage-tracker): Prove earned media shows up in AI
- [White-Label Reports](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/white-label-reports): Client-ready reports under your brand

## Free tools

- [Keyword → AI Prompts](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/keyword-to-prompts): Turn keywords into trackable AI prompts
- [AI Query Fan-Out](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/query-fanout): See the real sub-queries AI fans out (BYOK)
- [AI-Readiness Score](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/ai-readiness): Score your site on 5 of 28 AI-readiness checks
- [Agent Readiness Scanner](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/agent-readiness-scanner): The full agent readiness scan, free
- [AI Crawler Checker](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/ai-crawler-checker): Which of 34 AI crawlers your robots.txt blocks
- [robots.txt Tester & Checker](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/robots-txt-tester): Check what your robots.txt actually blocks
- [robots.txt Generator](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/robots-txt-generator): Build a robots.txt with AI crawler controls
- [Sitemap URL Extractor & Validator](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/sitemap-extractor): Extract and validate any XML sitemap
- [llms.txt Generator](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/llms-txt-generator): Build an llms.txt from your domain
- [llms.txt Checker](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/llms-txt-checker): Validate & score an existing llms.txt

## Blog (137 English articles)

- [Blog index](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog): every article, newest first
- [Complete article index, all locales](https://geotoolbox.ai/llms-blog.txt): every published article in en, fr and es
- [Full text of every English article](https://geotoolbox.ai/llms-full.txt): one fetch, no per-article requests

The 25 most recent:

- [Ahrefs Alternatives (2026): The Honest, Job-Based List](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/ahrefs-alternatives): The best Ahrefs alternatives for 2026, by job: broadest all-in-one, keyword research, backlinks, content, and AI-visibility tracking. Prices checked August 2026.
- [Semrush Alternatives (2026): The Honest, Job-Based List](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/semrush-alternatives): The best Semrush alternatives for 2026, picked by job: cheaper all-in-one, keyword research, backlinks, PPC, local, and AI-visibility tracking.
- [AI SEO: What It Actually Means (and How to Do It in 2026)](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/ai-seo): AI SEO means two different things: using AI to do SEO faster, and optimizing to get cited by AI search. Here's the breakdown, with 2026 data.
- [Is SEO Dead in 2026? What the Data Actually Says](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/is-seo-dead): Is SEO dead in 2026? No - but 'rank #1, get the click' is. The data on AI Overviews, zero-click search, and what actually gets you cited.
- [Topical Authority: How It Actually Works for Google and AI Search](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/topical-authority): Topical authority is how search and AI engines learn to treat your site as the expert on a subject. Here is how it really works, and whether AI search cares.
- [What Is Meta AI? The Assistant, the Muse Models, and Why It Matters](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/what-is-meta-ai): What is Meta AI? A current guide to Meta's free assistant: the Llama-to-Muse Spark switch, where it runs, Meta AI vs ChatGPT, privacy, and AI visibility.
- [Zero-Click Searches: The Real Numbers and What Still Works in 2026](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/zero-click-searches): Zero-click searches now end ~68% of US Google queries. Here is what that number really means, why rankings hold while traffic falls, and the levers that still work.
- [ChatGPT Ads: How They Work, What They Cost, and Who Sees Them](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/chatgpt-ads): ChatGPT ads are live for Free and Go users. How they work, who sees them, what advertisers pay, and what they mean for your organic AI visibility.
- [LLM SEO: What It Is, What's Different, and How to Do It (2026)](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/llm-seo): LLM SEO means getting your brand cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. What changes vs traditional SEO, what Google says to skip, and how to do it.
- [Semantic SEO: How to Write for Meaning, Not Keyword Strings](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/semantic-seo): Semantic SEO means optimizing for topics, entities, and meaning instead of exact-match keywords. Here's the retrieval mechanism behind it and how to do it.
- [GEO vs SEO: How to Split Your Budget Between Search and AI](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/geo-vs-seo): GEO vs SEO (and SEO vs GEO): what each optimizes for, when traditional SEO still wins, how to split the budget between them, and when to migrate to GEO.
- [Grok 4.6: Specs, Benchmarks, Real Cost & the Honest Verdict (2026)](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/grok-4-6): Grok 4.6 is xAI's agent-first model, out August 12, 2026. A close read of the specs, the real benchmark table, the 200K price cliff, and AI-search impact.
- [Semrush Review (2026): We Tested It on Three Real Sites](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/semrush-review): A hands-on Semrush review from a paying account: accuracy tested against Search Console on three sites, 2026 pricing decoded, and the complaints that matter.
- [DeepSeek V4: What It Actually Is Now (GA, Pricing, and the Catches)](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/deepseek-v4): DeepSeek V4 explained, current to August 2026: what changed at GA, Flash vs Pro, the real API cost, self-hosting, and how honest the benchmarks really are.
- [Best AI SEO Agencies (2026): An Honest Buyer's Guide](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/best-ai-seo-agencies): The best AI SEO (GEO) agencies in 2026, sorted by job, plus how to verify any agency's citation claims yourself in 20 minutes and when not to hire one at all.
- [How to Run Kimi K3 Locally: What It Actually Takes (2026)](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/how-to-run-kimi-k3-locally): How to run Kimi K3 locally: the real hardware for a 1.56TB model, five routes ranked by cost and speed, and an honest verdict on self-hosting.
- [Kimi K3 vs Claude: Coding, Cost, and Reasoning Compared](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/kimi-k3-vs-claude): Kimi K3 vs Claude, compared honestly: which wins on frontend coding, reasoning, speed, and real cost per task across Fable 5, Opus 5, and GPT-5.6 Sol.
- [OKF vs RAG: Does Google's Open Knowledge Format Replace RAG?](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/okf-vs-rag): Google's Open Knowledge Format (OKF) is being called a RAG killer. It isn't. What OKF v0.2 actually does, where it beats RAG, and how the two work together.
- [Claude Opus 5: Pricing, Benchmarks & What Actually Changed](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/claude-opus-5): Claude Opus 5 launched July 24, 2026 at the same price as Opus 4.8. The five effort levels, the real cost per task, and what breaks when you upgrade.
- [The Best AI Search Engines in August 2026](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/best-ai-search-engines): The best AI search engines in August 2026, ranked by what you actually use them for, with vendor-checked pricing and an honest look at citations.
- [The Best ChatGPT Alternatives in 2026, Sorted by Job](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/chatgpt-alternatives): The best ChatGPT alternatives in 2026, sorted by what you use them for, with vendor-checked July pricing: Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and more.
- [How ChatGPT Search Works](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/how-chatgpt-search-works): The model doesn't browse the web. A retrieval tool fetches live pages, and it answers with citations. How ChatGPT Search works and which index it uses.
- [How to Turn Off AI Overviews: What Actually Works in 2026](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/how-to-turn-off-ai-overviews): No official setting turns off Google AI Overviews. What works in 2026: the Web filter, udm=14, extensions, mobile fixes, and the real opt-out for site owners.
- [What Are Google AI Overviews? How They Work](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/what-are-google-ai-overviews): What Google AI Overviews are, how Gemini builds them with query fan-out, when they appear, how sources get cited, and what they mean for your site's traffic.
- [What Is Google AI Mode? How It Works](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/what-is-google-ai-mode): Google AI Mode is Google's conversational, Gemini-powered search. How query fan-out works, how it differs from AI Overviews, and how to turn it on or off.

## Glossary (57 terms)

- [Glossary index](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary): every GEO and AI-search term we define
- [Complete glossary index, all locales](https://geotoolbox.ai/llms-glossary.txt)

The first 25 alphabetically:

- [AI Agent](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/ai-agent): An AI agent is an AI system that takes actions to reach a goal, not just answers a question. Where a chatbot replies, an agent plans steps, uses tools (search, code, APIs, a browser), and works through a multi-step task on your behalf. Coding assistants, deep-research modes, and computer-use tools are common examples.
- [AI Citation](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/ai-citation): An AI citation, in the AI-search sense, is when an AI search engine references and links your page as a source in its answer. Citations are the core unit of AI visibility: in a zero-click world, being one of the cited sources, not ranking a blue link, is what gets your brand seen.
- [AI Crawler](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/ai-crawler): An AI crawler is an automated bot that fetches web pages for an AI company, either to train models or to retrieve live content for answers. You control most of them through robots.txt, but reaching AI answers depends on the right crawlers being allowed.
- [AI Hallucination](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/ai-hallucination): An AI hallucination is when a model generates false or fabricated information and presents it as fact. In AI search it shows up as wrong claims, invented sources, or incorrect brand details. Grounding answers in retrieved, citable sources is the main defense, which is why clear, sourced content matters.
- [AI Inference](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/ai-inference): Inference is the act of running a trained AI model to produce an output, as opposed to training, which is building the model in the first place. Every time you send a prompt and get an answer, that is one inference. It is where the ongoing cost, speed, and energy use of AI mostly live.
- [AI Overviews](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/ai-overviews): AI Overviews are Google's AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of some search results. Powered by Gemini (Gemini 3 became the default model in January 2026), they synthesize an answer from multiple web sources and link to a few of them, so users often get the answer without clicking. Being one of the cited sources is the goal of optimizing for AI Overviews.
- [AI Search Engine Optimization](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/ai-search-engine-optimization): AI search engine optimization is the umbrella term for improving how your brand appears in AI-powered search, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. It is the plain-English name for the same discipline also called generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO).
- [AI Visibility](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/ai-visibility): AI visibility is how often, and how favorably, AI engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity surface your brand in their answers. It is the AI-era equivalent of search rankings: instead of where you sit in a list of links, it measures whether the AI mentions, cites, or recommends you at all.
- [Amazonbot](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/amazonbot): Amazonbot is Amazon's web crawler, used to improve Amazon services such as letting Alexa answer more questions, with crawled data that may also help train Amazon's AI models. It identifies with the user agent Amazonbot and respects robots.txt.
- [Answer Engine](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/answer-engine): An answer engine is a search tool that returns a single synthesized answer to a question rather than a list of links to evaluate. Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and ChatGPT search are answer engines. Optimizing to be cited in them is the focus of answer engine optimization (AEO).
- [Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/answer-engine-optimization): Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content to win the direct answer in answer engines, including featured snippets, voice results, and AI answers. It overlaps almost entirely with generative engine optimization (GEO); the two are the same job described from different angles.
- [Applebot](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/applebot): Applebot is Apple's web crawler, powering Siri, Spotlight, and Safari search suggestions. A separate robots.txt token, Applebot-Extended, controls whether your content may be used to train Apple's foundation models, without affecting Applebot's search crawling.
- [Bingbot](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/bingbot): Bingbot is Microsoft's web crawler that builds the Bing search index. It matters for AI visibility because Bing's index also backs Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT search, so a page Bingbot cannot reach can be missing from those AI answers too.
- [Brand Mention](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/brand-mention): A brand mention is any reference to your brand across the web, linked or unlinked. For AI search, mentions act as corroboration: the more consistently your brand and its facts appear on trusted sources, the more confidently engines recognize and cite you.
- [Bytespider](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/bytespider): Bytespider is ByteDance's web crawler, used to collect data to train its large language models. It is known for crawling aggressively and reportedly does not always respect robots.txt, so blocking it often takes a server or WAF rule rather than robots.txt alone.
- [CCBot](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/ccbot): CCBot is the crawler operated by Common Crawl, a nonprofit that publishes a free, open dataset of web pages. Because that dataset is widely used to train large language models, CCBot is one of the most common indirect routes your content takes into AI systems. It respects robots.txt.
- [ChatGPT Search](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/chatgpt-search): ChatGPT Search is ChatGPT's ability to retrieve live web results and answer with citations, instead of relying on training data alone. Pages are gathered by OAI-SearchBot, and appearing in its answers is a separate goal from using ChatGPT to write content.
- [ChatGPT-User](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/chatgpt-user): ChatGPT-User is the OpenAI agent that fetches a specific web page in real time when a user's ChatGPT prompt requires it, such as following a link or answering a question about a page. It is distinct from GPTBot (training) and OAI-SearchBot (search indexing).
- [ClaudeBot](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/claudebot): ClaudeBot is Anthropic's training crawler, which gathers publicly available content that may train future Claude models. It is one of three Anthropic bots: Claude-SearchBot indexes pages for Claude's web search, and Claude-User fetches pages live during a user's session. Each respects robots.txt and is controlled separately.
- [Content Chunking](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/content-chunking): Content chunking is structuring a page into self-contained units, each making sense on its own, so AI systems can retrieve and cite a single passage cleanly. Engines pull chunks, not whole pages, so a section that stands alone without 'as mentioned above' is far easier to quote.
- [Context Window](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/context-window): A context window is how much text, measured in tokens, a language model can hold at once — the prompt, any retrieved sources, and the model's own generated answer, including the hidden reasoning a thinking model produces before it replies. In AI search, retrieved pages are loaded into the context window so the model can ground its answer in them.
- [E-E-A-T](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/e-e-a-t): E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, the qualities Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines use to judge content. It is not a direct ranking factor, but the signals behind it (first-hand experience and corroborated credibility) are what make content safer to cite, including in AI answers.
- [Entity SEO](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/entity-seo): Entity SEO is optimizing around clearly-defined entities (your brand, people, products, and concepts) and the relationships between them, rather than around keyword strings. It helps search and AI engines recognize who you are and connect facts to you, which makes you safer to cite.
- [Featured Snippet](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/featured-snippet): A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google pulls from a ranking page and shows at the very top of results, above the blue links. It predates AI search but rewards the same thing AI engines do: a concise, directly-stated answer that can be lifted out of the page.
- [Fine-Tuning](https://geotoolbox.ai/glossary/fine-tuning): Fine-tuning is further training a pretrained model on a smaller, focused dataset so it specializes in a task, tone, or domain. The model keeps its general knowledge but adjusts its weights toward your examples, which is why a fine-tuned model can sound on-brand or follow a niche format that prompting alone struggles to enforce.

## Français (60 articles)

- [Blog en français](https://geotoolbox.ai/fr/blog)
- [Glossaire en français](https://geotoolbox.ai/fr/glossary)
- [Index complet des articles](https://geotoolbox.ai/llms-blog.txt)

## Español (55 artículos)

- [Blog en español](https://geotoolbox.ai/es/blog)
- [Índice completo de artículos](https://geotoolbox.ai/llms-blog.txt)

## Optional

- [About](https://geotoolbox.ai/about): Who builds GEO Toolbox
- [Contact](https://geotoolbox.ai/contact): How to reach us
- [Agent instructions](https://geotoolbox.ai/agents.md): This guidance as a standalone markdown file
- [Review methodology](https://geotoolbox.ai/review-methodology): How we test tools we write about