The WordOut blog · July 17, 2026

Why every free GEO checker gives you a different number

By the WordOut team

Run your business through three free GEO checkers and you'll likely get three very different numbers — a 92, a 39, and something in between. None of them is broken. They're measuring different things, and knowing which is which tells you more about your AI visibility than any single score.

The two kinds of free GEO tools

Site crawlers (geo-tool.com, Topify, Readdy and most tools with “GEO score” in the name) read your website the way an AI crawler would: robots.txt permissions, schema markup, heading structure, whether your copy answers questions directly. They never ask ChatGPT anything. One of the most popular says it plainly in its own FAQ: the audit “is not a live measurement of individual AI surfaces.”

Brand checkers (HubSpot's AEO Grader, Ahrefs' AI Visibility Checker) do the opposite: they ask the AI engines about your business and grade the answer — whether you're mentioned, how you're described, how you rank against competitors. They don't look at your website's code at all.

Why the numbers disagree

We tested a real Boulder hospitality business on both kinds the same day. A site crawler gave it 92/100 — the website is genuinely well built. A brand checker gave it 21 to 56 out of 100 depending on the engine — because when you actually ask AI who to stay with in Boulder, this business doesn't come up.

Both tools are right. A clean website that AI never cites is like a beautiful storefront on a street nobody walks down.

How a blended score works

A useful GEO score has to weigh both sides — plus a third: whether the sources AI engines trust (maps, directories, reviews, local press) can find you at all. That's how our score is built: AI answer presence is half the score, because being named is the outcome that pays; findability and site readiness are a quarter each, because they're the levers that move it.

So if a site-only checker gives you a 90 and a blended score gives you a 50, there's no contradiction — your site passed its part, and the missing 40 points are the part no crawler can see: whether the engines actually say your name.

The one question that settles it

Skip the scores for a second. Open ChatGPT and ask it what a customer would ask — “who's the best [what you do] in [your town]?” If you're in the answer, congratulations. If a competitor is, every point of that 92 is decoration until that changes.