Here is what is measurable: when you type a prompt into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, the assistant runs web searches. Those searches hit Bing, Google or Brave. Pages that rank for those searches get read, and the ones that get read get cited. That’s the whole mechanism. It isn’t magic, and it isn’t new. It’s search.
Introducing GEO Search Console: your all-in-one GEO tool set
So the question isn’t “how do I write for AI.” It’s “what searches does the AI run for my prompt, and do I rank for them?” Nobody could answer that without a $300/month tracker, so I built GEO Search Console: 14 free tools for SEO/GEO that show you the searches the assistants actually run, where you rank for each one, whether AI crawlers can even reach your site, and what the assistants say about your brand when asked. No sign-up for 13 of them.
This post covers what the tools found, how they’re organized, and how to run an audit in about ten minutes.
What the assistants actually search for
On October 7, 2026 we ran the same 100 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini and logged every search each one fired. Not one of ChatGPT’s 216 searches matched the prompt word for word.
| Engine | Searches per prompt | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 2.2 average (216 total) | Searches averaged 10.1 words vs 7.7 for the prompts; 39% included a year |
| Claude | 1.0 average | One clean search per prompt, usually a tightened version of the question |
| Gemini | Searched on 54 of 100 prompts | Answers the rest from its own index |
Read that table again. The prompt your client gave you is not the keyword. ChatGPT rewrites it into something longer, adds “2026” four times in ten, and runs two of them. If your page ranks for the prompt but not for the rewrites, you’re invisible, and you’d never know why.
The worked example on the site is ahrefs.com. For one prompt, the assistants generated seven searches. Ahrefs ranked on Google for five of them and sat on page one for three. That’s what “AI visibility” looks like when you can measure it: a rank report, not a vibe.
The 14 tools, in the order a page becomes an answer
A page gets into an AI answer in five stages, and it fails at the first one far more often than people think. The tools follow that order.
| Stage | What has to be true | Tools |
|---|---|---|
| Reach | AI crawlers can fetch the page and it’s in the corpora they read | Crawl Record (Common Crawl), AI Visibility (bot access, robots.txt, firewall 403s), Brave Indexer |
| Search | You rank for the searches the assistant runs, not the prompt | Fan-Out, Rank Report, Question Finder (People Also Ask buying questions) |
| Cite | The assistant picks your page over a rival’s for the same search | Citation Gap (pages AI cites for competitors but not for you) |
| Describe | When asked about your brand, the assistant gets the facts right | Brand Facts, Knowledge Panel, Entity Schema, About Page, Schema Check, Link Preview |
| Measure | You can see citations trend over time | AI Performance (Google and Bing AI reports, combined) |
A few of these deserve a word.
Crawl Record checks Common Crawl directly. Common Crawl is the dataset most of the models were trained on, and I’ve seen enterprise sites with a WAF quietly 403-ing CCBot for years. Nobody noticed because nobody looked. This tool looks, per URL, across the last 3, 6 or 12 crawls, and runs in your browser so we never see your data.
Fan-Out is the one people come for. Type a prompt, get the real searches the assistants ran (across several runs, with repeats flagged) and your Google position for each. It can’t see Google AI Mode’s searches; nothing can yet.
Citation Gap is the competitive piece. It finds the pages assistants cite when answering about your competitors but never cite for you. That list is your content roadmap, and it’s built from what the engines did, not from what a keyword tool guessed.
Brand Facts asks the assistants about your brand and shows you what comes back. If ChatGPT thinks you’re headquartered in the wrong city or sells a product you discontinued in 2019, this is where you find out. Two brands a day free.
The ten-minute AI visibility audit
Work from your server outward. The first four steps run once per site; the last three repeat per prompt.
- Check robots.txt for AI bots. Run AI Visibility on your homepage. You’re looking at GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Google-Extended and CCBot. Half the “we’re invisible in ChatGPT” posts on r/SEO end here, with a block somebody’s security team added in 2023.
- Check the firewall. Same tool. robots.txt can say yes while Cloudflare or your WAF says 403. The tool shows you which bot got refused and by what.
- Check Common Crawl. Run Crawl Record on five key URLs. You want a recent fetch with a 200 and a full-size copy, not a near-empty one from a JS shell.
- Check the indexes. URL Inspection in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, plus AI Visibility for whether Claude’s search and ChatGPT can fetch the page. ChatGPT reads Bing. If you’ve ignored Bing for a decade, that’s now a problem.
- Run Fan-Out on your three most important prompts. Run each one three times. Note the searches that repeat; those are your targets.
- Read the rankings. Fan-Out gives you Google positions. For ChatGPT, check the same searches on Bing by hand; for Claude, check Brave. Different engine, different answer.
- Set up measurement. Bing’s AI Performance report and Search Console’s generative AI report, pulled together in the AI Performance tool. Rerun the audit monthly and any time your host, CDN, firewall or robots.txt changes.
The audit page on the site walks through each step in detail: geosearchconsole.co/ai-visibility-audit.
What this means for your SEO program
Nothing about your fundamentals changed. The assistants don’t read your prose and decide it’s good. They run a search, take what ranks, and summarize it. Ranking is still a function of authority and relevance to a query, and PageRank didn’t retire because OpenAI shipped a search box.
What changed is the query set. You used to optimize for the keyword in the brief. Now you optimize for the two or three longer, dated searches the assistant generates from that brief, and you need to rank on Bing and Brave as well as Google. That’s more work, not different work.
Three things to stop doing, because the data says they don’t matter:
- Stop shipping llms.txt and calling it GEO. In a 90-day log of 62,100 AI bot hits to one site, 84 went to /llms.txt. That’s 0.1%. The bots are fetching your pages, not your manifesto.
- Stop rewriting pages to be “conversational.” The assistant never sees the page unless it ranks. Fix the ranking.
- Stop paying for prompt-tracking before you’ve checked crawl access. A tracker will happily bill you $300 a month to report zero citations on a site that 403s CCBot.
And one thing to start: treat the fan-out searches as keywords. Put them in your rank tracker. Build pages for the ones you don’t rank for. Earn links to them. Same job as 2015, with a longer keyword list.
Pricing, privacy and what’s next
All 14 tools are free. Thirteen run without an account; Rank Report needs a Google sign-in, and signing in raises the daily limits on the rest. Brand Facts allows two brands a day.
Crawl Record, AI Performance and Entity Schema run entirely in your browser, so your URLs and reports never touch our server. The others run server-side, and the About page spells out exactly what’s kept. GEO Search Console isn’t affiliated with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Exa, Brave or the Common Crawl Foundation. It just measures what they do.
If you find a bug, or a bot we don’t check for, post it in r/SEO and tag me. If you find a GEO tactic that moves citations and the tools can’t explain why, I’d like to see it even more.
Start here: geosearchconsole.co: Run Fan-Out on the prompt your biggest client cares about and see what ChatGPT actually searched for. It won’t be what’s in the brief.