The free Hikoo audit analyzes your URL in 30 seconds: it checks AI crawler access (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended), queries ChatGPT and Gemini on real customer questions, measures your citation rate, identifies the competitors appearing in your place, and returns a global GEO score from 0 to 100 with the 3 fixes to launch this week. No account, no credit card.
Why an AI audit and not a classic SEO audit?
In October 2025, Sam Altman confirmed that ChatGPT exceeds 800 million weekly users . On Google, AI Overviews now capture the first answer: 58.5% of searches in the United States and 59.7% in Europe end without a click to an external site . Classic SEO measures your position in the SERPs. It says nothing about your presence inside the generated answer the user actually sees.
An AI visibility audit answers a single question: when a prospect asks ChatGPT or Gemini for a tool like yours, are you cited? If the answer is no, the audit identifies the why: blocked crawler, missing llms.txt, content too short, weak authority, better-positioned competitors.
What the Hikoo audit measures in 30 seconds
The audit combines two families of signals: a technical crawl of your URL and a live test against AI models.
- Technical GEO health: title, meta description, unique H1, mobile viewport, robots.txt, sitemap, llms.txt, Schema.org structured data, content length, author and date presence.
- AI crawler access: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and bingbot. If one is blocked, the score drops and the audit names it explicitly.
- Measured AI visibility: a sample of prompts representative of your industry is sent to ChatGPT and Gemini. The tool counts how many responses cite your domain.
- Competitor gap: domains cited in your place are surfaced. You see exactly who is winning the AI recommendations from you.
- Citation-ready score: E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals that AI uses to weigh the reliability of a source.
Sites with Domain Trust above 91 get on average 6 citations per AI query, versus 1.6 for those under 43. The gap widens further when authority, llms.txt, and content freshness are combined. A regular audit is the only way to see where you sit on this curve.
How to read your global GEO score
The global GEO score aggregates three weighted sub-scores: technical health (40%), measured AI visibility (40%), and citation-readiness (20%). Here is the reading grid the Hikoo team uses on client audits.
- Score 0 - 39: your site is nearly invisible to AI. Fixes are massive (often a blocked crawler, no llms.txt, no schema). Every day without action, your competitors capture conversational traffic in your place.
- Score 40 - 69: AI sees your site but does not recommend it enough. The technical base is correct, but authority or content depth is missing. A wave of targeted optimizations (3 to 5 streams) is usually enough to clear the 70 mark.
- Score 70 - 100: AI recommends you. You are above the sector median. The challenge becomes maintenance: monitoring competitors, quarterly content refreshes, watching new models (GPT-5, Gemini 3, Claude 4.7).
The 6 checks that drive the score
| Check | Why it matters | Typical fix |
|---|---|---|
| AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) | If blocked, your site is invisible to ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. | Allow explicitly in robots.txt. |
| llms.txt file | Tells AI which pages to prioritize. Adopted by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity. | Publish /llms.txt and /.well-known/llms.txt. |
| Structured data (Schema.org) | AI extracts Organization, Article, FAQPage, and BreadcrumbList better than raw text. | Add JSON-LD inside the <head>. |
| Visible author and date | E-E-A-T has been a major citation criterion since the December 2025 Google update. | Display the author, their role, and the update date. |
| Content depth | Pages > 2,900 words receive on average 5.1 citations versus 3.2 below 800 words. | Beef up target pages with data and citations. |
| Citations on real prompts | The only direct indicator: does your domain appear when a prospect queries AI? | Iterate content + authority, retest every 2-4 weeks. |
What the free audit does not do (and why)
Let us be transparent. A 30-second analysis on a single URL does not replace a full GEO audit. It is built to give a reliable signal quickly, not an exhaustive map.
- Only one URL analyzed per audit (not the entire site).
- Limited prompt sample (the full audit tests several hundred per month).
- ChatGPT and Gemini only in the free version. Perplexity, Claude, and Bing Copilot are in the full audit.
- No score history, no competitor alerts, no daily monitoring.
- No per-page personalized recommendations: only the top 3 global priorities.
For a deeper look across your whole site, see our complete guide to ChatGPT citations.
What to do in the week after your audit
- Unblock AI crawlers. If the audit flags GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or Google-Extended as blocked, remove the Disallow directive from robots.txt. Time: 10 minutes. Impact: regain eligibility for citations.
- Publish a minimal llms.txt. List your 10-15 strategic pages with a title and a short description. Deploy at /llms.txt and /.well-known/llms.txt. Time: 1 hour. Impact: strong signal for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity.
- Add Organization, Article, and FAQPage JSON-LD. Generate it with a dedicated tool if needed, paste it into the <head>. Time: 2 to 4 hours depending on the CMS. Impact: better extraction by AI, better eligibility for AI Overviews.
- Beef up the 5 most strategic pages: minimum 2,900 words, expert quotes, sourced statistics, visible update date. Time: 1 to 2 weeks. Impact: significant jump on the citation-readiness sub-score.
- Re-run the audit 14 days later to measure the delta. AI models update their index every 2 to 4 weeks (Princeton, GEO).
Run your free audit now. One URL, 30 seconds, your GEO score, and the 3 priority fixes. Test my site on tryhikoo.com/tools/free-audit.
Frequently asked questions
Conclusion
AI search is no longer an optional channel: it is one of the first contact points between your prospects and your market. A free audit does not replace a complete GEO strategy, but it answers in 30 seconds the only question that matters today: is AI recommending your site, or is it recommending your competitors? From that measurement, the action plan becomes obvious: unblock crawlers, publish an llms.txt, structure your data, beef up target pages, measure the delta every two weeks.
Sources
- Aggarwal P., Murahari V., Rajpurohit T., Kalyan A., Narasimhan K., & Deshpande A. GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. arXiv / ACM KDD 2024
- Southern M. New Data Reveals The Top 20 Factors Influencing ChatGPT Citations. Search Engine Journal, 2025
- Lafferty N. AI Platform Citation Patterns. Profound, 2025
- Goodwin D. Google AI Overviews Are Hurting Click-Through Rates. Search Engine Land, 2025
- Up & Social Zero-Click Searches: Why 60% of Google Users Never Click Through. 2025
- Altman S. Sam Altman says ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active users. TechCrunch, 2025