We build a tool that measures whether AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — can find, understand, and recommend a brand. So we pointed it at ourselves. Here's the raw result, warts included.

What is a GEO audit?

A GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) audit measures whether AI engines can crawl your site, extract clean answers from it, and cite you when someone asks a relevant question. It's the AI-era counterpart to a technical SEO audit: instead of "can Googlebot rank this page," it asks "would ChatGPT quote this page, and does it know what your brand is?"

DadSEO runs two of these: a GEO audit (crawler access + passage extractability + which AI surface to prioritize) and a brand-presence audit (whether AI models find a verified entity for you across YouTube, Reddit, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, GitHub). We ran both on getdadseo.com.

Can AI crawlers even reach us? Yes — that part's fine.

Every AI crawler that matters is explicitly allowed, and the site is server-side rendered, so there's no JavaScript wall hiding our answers. The audit confirmed robots.txt permits GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended. Zero crawlers blocked. No CDN or WAF false-positives.

Our structured-data stack came back "unusually complete for a small SaaS" — Organization, SoftwareApplication, WebSite, Article, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, and WebPage schema all present. If crawler access and schema were the whole game, we'd be winning.

They aren't.

So why are we still hard to cite?

Because access is not the same as extractability — our pages open with preamble instead of the answer. The audit's finding: across our blog posts and feature pages, the primary answer almost never appears in the first 60 words of a section. An LLM building an answer wants a crisp, quotable sentence up top. We were burying ours under intros.

The one page that passed cleanly was /faq — answer-in-first-60-words, every time. Everything else read like a blog warming up.

Two more self-inflicted wounds:

Brand casing drift. Our name appears as "DadSEO" on most pages but slips to "dadseo" on at least four. To an entity graph, those can read as two different things — fragmenting exactly the signal we need consolidated.
A lazy llms.txt. The file exists, but it's a copy of our blog index, not a curated list of answer-ready pages. We told the AIs "here's everything" instead of "here's what to cite."

The part that stung: our two audits disagreed on what we are.

The brand-presence audit described our audience as "busy dads and side-hustlers" — while the GEO audit correctly called us a "niche B2B SaaS" for "SEO practitioners." Our own tooling couldn't agree on our identity. That is not a bug in the audits. It's the most honest possible finding: when a brand has no canonical, verified entity anywhere on the web, even its own AI reads the name "DadSEO" and guesses. One model anchored on "Dad." The other anchored on "SEO." Both were guessing because we never told the web, unambiguously, which one we are.

That is the entire GEO problem in one screenshot. If our own tool guesses, ChatGPT guesses, and a guess is not a recommendation.

Where are we actually invisible?

Nowhere that AI models look for social proof — we have zero verified presence on YouTube, Reddit, Wikipedia/Wikidata, or a real GitHub footprint. The brand-presence audit found no youtube.com/@dadseo, no r/dadseo, no encyclopedia entry. The one LinkedIn page that exists is unverified and empty — almost certainly a name collision, not us.

Why it matters, with the numbers the audit surfaced:

Reddit is where people literally type "which SEO tool should I use?" — and it's ~46.7% of Perplexity's citations and ~11.3% of ChatGPT's.
YouTube has the single strongest correlation with AI citations (~0.737) and is where buyers look for demos.

We're absent from both. So when an AI answers a "best tool for X" question, it reaches for the brands that are there. Right now that's our competitors.

What we're fixing first (and what we're deliberately skipping)

Fix the identity and the extractability before chasing new channels — those are the cheap, compounding wins. Our prioritized list, straight from the audit:

Lock one canonical entity. "DadSEO" everywhere, tighten the SoftwareApplication schema (applicationCategory: "BusinessApplication", operatingSystem: "Web", a pricing offer), so every model binds the same identity.
Rewrite our two best posts answer-first. The GSC export guide and the 16-month data-retention explainer get H2s that map to real sub-questions ("Will I lose data after 16 months if I do nothing?"), each opening with a bold factual answer in 30 words — exactly like the headings in this post.
Add FAQPage schema to those blog posts, not just /faq.
Curate llms.txt down to five high-intent pages, each with a one-line "cite this when…" summary.
Claim the channels: r/dadseo + youtube.com/@dadseo, then show up advice-first in r/SEO, r/smallbusiness, and r/juststart.

Deliberately skipped: a Wikipedia page (the notability bar for a young SaaS is a trap — a rejected article hurts more than no article), and heavy LinkedIn investment (verify the page, then leave it — our audience isn't there).

The honest takeaway

We sell AI-search visibility and we were failing our own audit. That's not embarrassing — it's the point. The tool found real, specific, fixable problems on the site of the person who built it. If it can do that to us, it can do it to you.

Want to see what an AI engine thinks your brand is? Run your own GEO audit — it takes a couple of minutes and connects to your real Search Console data.