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 responses. As large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity become go-to tools for discovery and decision-making, showing up in their responses 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.
What does the Technical Audit measure?
When you run a Technical Audit on a URL, Gumshoe 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 overall 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.
What are Technical Audit recommendations?
Technical Audit recommendations are the specific, actionable suggestions Gumshoe 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. Working through these recommendations and re-running the Technical Audit after making changes is the most direct way to improve your score over time.
Keeping your content fresh and well-structured increases the likelihood that your brand appears in AI-generated answers across platforms, driving awareness, authority, and conversions.