Generative engine optimization from one command line: which buyer questions matter, who answers them today, what page type gets quoted, and whether the engines can even fetch you. Facts in, judgment yours.
One CLI, no data-vendor account · Measuring your own site is free · Works in Claude Code, Codex & any agent that runs skills or MCP
A sample, not a monitor: one call is one draw, cached 30 days. Who gets quoted and what kind of page it is — that changes what you build. "We were not in this one answer" changes nothing.
Your agent asks in the chat. Both faces of the answer come back fresh.
Engines quote passages, not pages — and only from what they can retrieve. Five stages, what we power, and the lines we deliberately don't cross.

An AI answer is built from a question and the sub-questions the engine fans it out into — most of them have no measurable search volume, and they carry about a third of all citations. The questions come from data, not guesswork: the ones Google hangs on the results page (seo serp → People Also Ask and related searches), the question-shaped keywords your competitors live on (seo competitors), the questions Search Console already shows you for, the forum threads on the page, the sub-questions ChatGPT actually searched (--engine), the stored AI answers that cite a rival (competitors --ai) — and the questions real people sent to your own inbox.
invent questions, or call an estimate a demand curve. Every row carries its source and whether a real person asked it.

Google's top ten is not the AI answer: only 38% of AI Overview citations come from it, and 8% of ChatGPT's. One seo serp — or clize geo, the same read with the AI face on by default — gives you the Google face (who occupies the page, which roundups you could be in) and the AI face — who the AI Overview quotes, with the sentence it lifted. Add --engine chatgpt,gemini,aimode,perplexity for who each engine cited, which brands it named and what it searched. Each is one sample on demand, about $0.02 per engine, cached 30 days. What it tells you is the shape: vendor docs, a publisher roundup, a forum thread, a wall of official docs — and that shape decides the next step.
keep a score or a schedule. There is no "were you cited" field and no cron — the same prompt rarely returns the same answer twice, so a percentage would be noise dressed as a number.

Every question ends in one decision: fix a page the engines cannot fetch, build the answer that is missing, get the evidence first when your page would only restate what the cited pages say, record that a rival is named where you are not, or defer. What gets a small site quoted is something the roundups cannot restate — an integration you actually ran, a comparison that can be reproduced, original numbers, exact pricing and limits. The free skill carries the page shapes engines quote (a category comparison with a real table; a short answer page per question cluster), and build site check warns on the three parts a machine can see — a comparison page that never names you in its first 200 words, one without a table, a content page with no visible date.
generate content, pad to a length, or serve engines a page people never see. The writing is your agent's brain; Clize is the hands.

Engines reach you two ways — live retrieval when the question needs current facts, and model memory that lags months — and you only control the door: search and training crawlers allowed in robots.txt, no edge block (domain check reads Cloudflare's AI-crawler policy as its fifth layer; new zones default to blocking since 2026-09-15), body text in HTML, a URL that resolves in one hop, a sitemap whose lastmod is a real content change, IndexNow for Bing's index. Clize-hosted sites ship all of it on deploy; for any other site the skill carries the checklist.
submit your URL to ChatGPT. There is no such thing — anything that claims otherwise is selling something.

seo check lists the visits AI engines actually sent, page by page — the milestone is the first non-zero. Above that sit two reports that only exist as web pages, Search Console's generative-AI impressions and Bing's AI Performance citations, which the skill reads as a time series against yourself. Outcomes are recorded in layers — fetched, cited, named, recommended correctly, visited, converted — because being cited says nothing about being named, and being named nothing about being described correctly.
report an AI visibility percentage. Sampling dressed as a share is a product-integrity failure, and we would rather show you a zero.
Public studies, 2025–2026. Correlations, mostly — which is exactly why the loop asks for a decision every round, not a page every round.
| What | Number | Where from |
|---|---|---|
| AI Overview citations from Google's top ten | 38% (a stricter count: 17%) | Ahrefs, 863K SERPs, 2026-03; BrightEdge, 2026-02 |
| ChatGPT citations overlapping Google's top ten | 8%; 28% of its most-cited pages have no Google visibility | Ahrefs, 15,000 queries, 2025-08; Ahrefs top 1,000 pages, 2025-10 |
| Citations that go to roundup-style pages | 63% of citations to the 25,000 most-cited URLs | Evertune, ~400M citations, 2026-05 |
| Citations that name no brand at all | 61.7% | Semrush ghost-citations study, 2026-06 |
| Same prompt, same answer list twice | under 1%; same order about 1 in 1,000 | SparkToro, 2,961 runs, 2026-01 |
| llms.txt files never requested by anyone | 97% | Ahrefs, 137,210 domains, 2026-06 |
| Pages that added schema markup: lift in AI citations | none found (a small drop the authors do not attribute to the markup) | Ahrefs matched study, 1,885 pages, 2026-05 |
| ChatGPT shopping tasks that never leave ChatGPT | 92.8% | Profound, 224 tasks, 2026-07 |
Each figure is a correlation from one study with its own sample and definitions; none of them is a rule that makes a page get quoted. The full survey with sources is in the LLM SEO guide.
Three steps. No dashboard, no data-vendor signup.
One package. clize install wires the skill into Claude Code, Codex, Pi — any agent that runs skills or MCP; log in once in the browser.
$ npm i -g @clize/clize $ clize install $ clize login
A buyer's question, as they would ask it. About $0.03, plus $0.02 per AI engine.
$ clize geo "best email api for ai agents" = seo serp … --engine chatgpt,aimode
The free skill turns the read into one of five decisions and carries the page shapes engines quote.
You: what do we build
for this one?Every engine read is one draw, on demand, cached 30 days. No cron, no score, no "were you cited" field.
We do not email roundup authors, post on forums or submit anywhere. Trust positions are built by humans.
Your own site's AI referrals, index state and edge policy cost nothing to read; research queries say their price up front.
The short honest versions.
GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of getting your pages quoted in AI answers — ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot. Those engines quote passages, not pages, and they pick them from what they can retrieve: so GEO is finding the questions buyers ask, reading who answers them today, building the page type that gets quoted, and making sure the engines can fetch it.
Partly. Google's own AI features run on its core search index, and Perplexity draws 65 to 82 percent of its citations from Google's top ten — so for those engines, being indexed and ranking is the precondition. ChatGPT is different: only about 8 percent of its citations overlap Google's top ten and 28 percent of its most-cited pages have no Google visibility at all. GEO is the extra layer on top of SEO — questions instead of keywords, both faces of every answer, and a crawl check that includes the AI crawlers.
Two ways. Live retrieval: when a question needs current information the engine runs searches (Google's index for Gemini and the AI Overview, third-party search plus its own index for ChatGPT, Perplexity's own crawler) and lifts passages from what it finds. Model memory: a share of ChatGPT answers never go online and rely on training crawls that lag months. What you control is the lock on the door: search and training crawlers allowed in robots.txt, no edge block, body text in HTML, a URL that resolves in one hop. There is no such thing as submitting a URL to ChatGPT.
No evidence that it does. A 137,000-site log study found 97 percent of llms.txt files were never requested by anyone, and no engine has said it reads them. Clize-hosted sites ship one because it costs nothing, but we do not sell it as a lever and you should not build a strategy on it.
Not as a score, and not on a schedule. The same prompt rarely returns the same answer twice, so a visibility percentage is noise dressed as a number. What Clize gives you is samples on demand (who each engine cited for a question, right now), the real click-throughs from AI engines in your traffic, and the reading of the two web-only reports — Search Console's generative-AI impressions and Bing's AI Performance — as a time series against yourself.
Measuring your own site is free. Research queries are metered per call from your Clize balance and say what they cost: a results-page read is about $0.03, adding an AI engine about $0.02 per engine, a competitor's stored AI answers about $1 per domain. One monthly cap you set yourself backstops the spend; no data-vendor account is needed.
Small generators and validators that run in your browser, no signup.
Both faces of a buyer's question, from your first command.
$ npm i -g @clize/clize && clize install && clize geo "your buyer's question"