# WideAngle — GEO & SEO audits for modern web frameworks

WideAngle is a site auditing tool that scores SEO and Generative Engine Optimization across
126 rules. It crawls your site, tells you which signals stop Google ranking it and which stop
ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity quoting it, then applies the fixes that can be applied safely.

- Canonical page: https://wideangle.online/
- Licence: Apache-2.0
- Author: Abdullatif
- Published: 2026-09-08 · Updated: 2026-09-08

## Key takeaways

1. **SEO and GEO are different jobs.** SEO decides whether Google ranks a page. GEO decides
   whether an answer engine quotes it.
2. **Retrieval crawlers are not training crawlers.** Blocking `OAI-SearchBot` or `PerplexityBot`
   removes a site from AI answers with no upside.
3. **Most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript.** Content that appears only after hydration does not
   exist to them.
4. **Retrieval happens per passage, not per page.** A section that cannot stand alone never becomes
   the quoted passage.
5. **WideAngle checks all 126 signals** — 82 SEO rules and 44 GEO rules — and reports the fix beside
   each finding.

## What is Generative Engine Optimization?

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a website readable, trustworthy and
quotable by AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. It shares
a foundation with classic SEO — both want crawlable, well-structured pages — but it asks questions
SEO never had to.

| Discipline | Decides | Audience | Unit of retrieval | Fails when |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| SEO | Whether you rank | Googlebot, Bingbot | The page | Slow, unindexable or duplicated pages |
| GEO | Whether you are quoted | OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot | The passage | Blocked retrieval, JS-only content, unresolvable entity |

## Why do answer engines skip a site?

**Content only exists after hydration.** Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript. Content that
appears only once the client-side bundle runs does not exist to them — they see an empty shell.
Rule: `geo/empty-html-shell`.

**The wrong bots were blocked.** Retrieval crawlers are how answer engines fetch a page in order to
cite it. They are a different thing from training crawlers, which a site may legitimately want to
block. Rule: `geo/retrieval-crawlers-allowed`.

**Pages do not chunk.** Retrieval happens at passage level, not page level. A section that does not
stand on its own never becomes the quoted passage. Rules: `geo/answer-first`, `geo/chunk-size`.

## What does WideAngle check?

WideAngle checks 126 rules across two scored pillars.

**SEO — 82 rules.** Meta and social, content structure, links and crawl graph, images and media,
structured data, technical health, internationalisation, performance signals.

**GEO — 44 rules.** AI crawler access, machine extractability, answer readiness, citation authority,
entity clarity. Includes per-agent robots.txt policy across 18 AI crawlers, llms.txt validity and
coverage, and server HTML versus post-JavaScript content.

Framework-aware for Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, SvelteKit and Remix, so findings point at the file and the
line rather than only the URL.

## Frequently asked questions

**Is GEO different from SEO?** GEO and SEO overlap but are not the same job. Both want crawlable,
well-structured pages. Only GEO cares whether retrieval crawlers are allowed, whether content
survives without JavaScript, whether sections stand alone when quoted out of context, and whether
the brand resolves to a single identifiable entity.

**Why can AI not quote my site?** The three most common causes are content that renders only after
client-side hydration; a robots.txt that blocks retrieval crawlers alongside training crawlers; and
pages whose sections carry no self-contained answer.

**Do I need to block AI crawlers?** Blocking training crawlers such as `GPTBot`, `ClaudeBot` and
`CCBot` is a legitimate policy choice. Blocking retrieval crawlers is almost never what a site
wants. WideAngle reports the two groups separately, so the decision stays yours.

**Which frameworks does WideAngle support?** Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, SvelteKit and Remix are
framework-aware. Any reachable site can be audited over HTTP regardless of framework.

**What does WideAngle cost?** The command-line auditor is free and Apache-2.0 licensed. The hosted
platform is in early access; waitlist members get three months of Pro at no cost when it opens.

## Links

- [About](https://wideangle.online/about.html)
- [Contact](https://wideangle.online/contact.html)
- [Privacy](https://wideangle.online/privacy.html)