Why We Stopped Doing SEO and Focused on GEO Instead

SeoCheckly started as an SEO analysis tool. Today it focuses on GEO: understanding whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude mention your site. Here is why we made the switch.

Why We Stopped Doing SEO and Focused on GEO Instead

When we launched SeoCheckly, the plan was straightforward: a tool that analyzes a website and returns an SEO score, with suggestions on what to improve. Nothing groundbreaking, but useful.

A few months in, we realized we were building in an already crowded market. There are dozens of solid SEO tools out there, many of them free, with years of development behind them. Competing on that ground without a clear differentiator made no sense.

Meanwhile, something else was happening.

The way people search for information is changing

This is not a future trend. It is happening now. A growing share of searches does not end up on Google but on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini. People ask questions and get direct answers. If your site is not mentioned in those answers, you do not exist for that slice of users.

The problem is that few people understand how this mechanism works, and even fewer know how to check whether their site appears in these responses. There are no accessible tools that explain it clearly to someone who manages a website without being a developer.

That is the gap we decided to fill.

What GEO is

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. The idea is simple: making sure that AI engines, when answering a question relevant to your business, cite your site or your brand.

To get there, there are a few technical and content conditions a site needs to meet. ChatGPT and Perplexity bots need to be able to access the site. There needs to be a readable data structure (schema.org, FAQ sections, author information). The content needs to be organized so that an AI system can extract information from it and cite it with confidence.

None of this is impossible to implement. But before doing it, you need to know where you are starting from.

What SeoCheckly does now

We rewrote the analysis engine. Instead of measuring load times and meta tags, the tool checks 14 specific aspects related to visibility in AI responses, grouped into four areas:

AI bot accessibility (robots.txt, llms.txt, access barriers)
structured data (schema.org, Open Graph, valid markup)
authority and trust (E-E-A-T, about page, external citations, linked social profiles)
content structure (FAQ sections, semantic headings, readability, entity density)

The result is not a technical score. It is an answer to the question: can ChatGPT find you? With three possible answers: yes, partially, no. Followed by a list of concrete problems and actions to take, in priority order.

For Agency plan users, we also added a live test: the tool generates five questions relevant to the site's business and sends them to ChatGPT and Perplexity, then analyzes the responses to see whether the brand is cited, in what position, and in what context.

Why now

The GEO market for small and medium businesses is largely empty. Those working on GEO today are mostly large agencies or specialist consultants, with fees that are out of reach for someone running a shop, a professional practice, or a local services website.

We want to give anyone who manages a website the ability to understand where they stand on this front and what to do to improve, without hiring a specialist.

The time is now because those who build their GEO presence today, when the market is still relatively uncompetitive, will have a real advantage in the years ahead compared to those who wait.

What stays the same

The name SeoCheckly stays. The domain stays. The infrastructure is the same. What changed is the problem we are trying to solve.

If you already have an account, your reports are still there. New reports use the new GEO analysis system.

If you want to understand how your site looks to ChatGPT and Perplexity, you can do that now, for free, with one analysis per month on the free plan.