About SearchGrade

Why search visibility now spans Google and AI

For two decades, "being found" meant ranking in Google. That is still essential — but it is no longer the whole picture. People increasingly get answers from featured snippets, voice assistants, and generative engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Those surfaces reward different signals: structured data, clear entities, citable facts, and answer-ready formatting. SearchGrade measures all of it in one pass, so a single report covers traditional SEO and the emerging AI-search standards side by side.

What we measure

Every audit runs 130 checks, grouped into four categories:

Technical68 checks

Site health and infrastructure — HTTPS, crawlability, structured data, Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering, caching and compression.

Content26 checks

On-page and marketing signals — title and meta tags, heading structure, readability, word count, Open Graph, links and brand consistency.

AEO14 checks

Answer Engine Optimization — FAQ, HowTo and Article schema, question-form headings, featured-snippet formatting, and voice-ready answers.

GEO22 checks

Generative Engine Optimization — entity clarity, E-E-A-T, citations, semantic HTML and fact density that help AI engines understand and cite you.

How an audit works

1. Enter a URL. SearchGrade fetches the page — or crawls the whole site — exactly as a search crawler would.
2. Every applicable check runs across the four categories, with checks that don't apply to your site marked as not applicable rather than counted against you.
3. You get a letter grade, a category breakdown, and a prioritized list of fixes you can export to a PDF report.

How scoring works

Each check is scored from 0 to 100. Category scores are combined with a weighting that favors the fundamentals — Technical 35%, Content 30%, GEO 20%, AEO 15% — and the result is mapped to a letter grade on a curve calibrated against real-world sites. The full breakdown, including every check we run, is public on the scoring methodology page.

Standards & sources we test against

SearchGrade's checks are grounded in published, public guidance — not opaque heuristics:

• schema.org — the structured-data vocabulary our schema checks validate against.
• Google Search Central — the SEO and structured-data guidance behind our technical and content checks.
• web.dev — Core Web Vitals — the performance and page-experience metrics we measure.

We audit ourselves

We run SearchGrade on searchgrade.app and act on what it flags — the same checks and the same scoring we apply to everyone. When a finding doesn't genuinely apply, we mark it not applicable rather than game the score; when it points to a real gap, we fix it. The tool's credibility depends on holding our own site to the standard we report on.

Who it's for

Agencies auditing client sites, site owners tracking their own visibility, and marketers preparing for an AI-first search landscape. Start on the free tier — no credit card — and upgrade only when you need deeper crawls or higher limits.

Common questions