Why Your 'Free SEO Score' Tools Are Lying to You — We Asked the LLMs Directly
Most "free SEO score" tools work the same way: they fetch your homepage, check a few tags, maybe measure load speed, and hand you a number. It feels scientific. It isn't.
We learned this the hard way while building our own scoring tool.
The lapse we didn't expect
Our first version did what every other tool does — a surface check. Title tag? Present. Meta description? Present. H1? Present. Score: 74/100. Looks healthy.
Then we ran a late-iteration experiment that changed everything: instead of checking the page, we asked the AI engines directly what they knew about the business.
The answer, for a business that "scored 74," was essentially: nothing. ChatGPT didn't recognize the company. Perplexity couldn't describe its services. Claude had never heard of it. The website was technically fine — and completely invisible where it actually mattered.
Why surface checks miss the point
A traditional page audit answers the question: "Is this website well-built?" But AI visibility answers a different question entirely: "When a customer asks an AI who to hire, does your business come up?"
Those two questions overlap far less than most people assume. A flawless website with no citation footprint, no structured data, and no presence in the sources AI models trust is — to an AI engine — a business that doesn't exist.
What we do differently now
Our free AEO Score still looks at your site — schema markup, content structure, crawler access all matter. But the core of the score comes from actually querying the LLMs: Do you recognize this business? Would you recommend it? What do you know about its services and reputation?
The gap between those two approaches is the gap between a vanity metric and a real diagnosis. It's the difference between "your title tag is 62 characters" and "ChatGPT has never heard of you."
One of those tells you something you can act on.
The takeaway
If a tool promises to measure your AI visibility without ever asking an AI about you, be skeptical. The only way to know what the answer engines see is to ask them.
That's what we built. Get your free AEO score [blocked] — and see what the AI engines actually say about your business.