The Technical Audit (formerly known as the Page Audit) is Gumshoe's tool for evaluating how well a page on your website is structured for AI-generated answers. As AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity become go-to tools for discovery and decision-making, showing up in their answers matters just as much as ranking on Google.
Traditional SEO focused on keywords and backlinks to help pages rank in search results. The Technical Audit goes further: it evaluates whether AI models can find your content, understand it, and cite it when generating answers.
Why are there two versions of the Technical Audit?
Gumshoe runs two versions of the Technical Audit side by side, and every run gives you results from both. You'll find them on two tabs on the Analysis results page: Technical Audit (the original version, v1) and Technical Audit v2 Beta.
- The original Technical Audit (v1) is AI-graded feedback. An AI model reviews a structured extract of your page and writes Highlights and Recommendations across six categories. Because a model is making the call, results can vary a little between runs on a page that hasn't changed.
- Technical Audit v2 runs about 20 pass or fail checks. Each result shows the evidence Gumshoe found, a reason code, why it matters for AI, and how to fix it. The same page gets the same result.
- The two scores use different formulas, so they aren't expected to match or move together.
For the full comparison, see Why don't my Technical Audit and Technical Audit v2 scores match?.
What does the original Technical Audit (v1) measure?
When you run a Technical Audit on a URL, the original version evaluates it across six categories and produces an overall AI Optimization Score. Each category gets its own score along with a list of Highlights (what is working) and Recommendations (what to improve).
- Structured Data Assessment: whether your page uses schema markup to make content machine-readable and identifiable to AI models.
- Page Layout Structure: whether your heading hierarchy, HTML structure, and content sections are organized in a way AI models can parse clearly.
- Schema Markup: the depth and accuracy of your schema implementation, including organization, product, service, and other relevant types.
- Navigation: internal linking structure, breadcrumb navigation, and how well AI models can understand your site's hierarchy from this page.
- Content Balance: the ratio of substantive, meaningful text to markup and promotional language on the page.
- Metadata: the presence and quality of title tags, meta descriptions, Open Graph tags, and other metadata that helps AI models understand page context.
What does my AI Optimization Score mean?
Your AI Optimization Score reflects how well AI models can interpret and reference your page based on the six categories above. A lower score means there are improvements to make. In many cases, targeted changes to content structure or metadata can lead to meaningful gains without a full page rebuild.
The AI Optimization Score belongs to the original Technical Audit. Technical Audit v2 has its own score, built from its pass or fail checks, and the two aren't expected to match.
What are Technical Audit recommendations?
Technical Audit recommendations are the specific, actionable suggestions the original Technical Audit surfaces for each category after analyzing your page. Each recommendation identifies something that could make the page easier for AI models to crawl, understand, or cite.
In Technical Audit v2, the equivalent is each failed check. Every failed check explains why it matters for AI and how to fix it, and it passes once the fix is live, which makes v2 the clearer way to confirm a fix worked.
Working through recommendations and failed checks, then rerunning the Technical Audit after your changes are published, is the most direct way to improve your score over time. Starter includes 10 Technical Audit runs a month and Pro includes 50, counted in runs, not URLs. See What's included in the Starter and Pro Subscription plans?.
What should I do next?
Pick the pages worth fixing first. How do I use my Technical Audit results to improve my pages? walks through which pages to start with and how to work through the results.