How this analysis works

Search Operator reads your homepage plus the 4 internal links that look most relevant to your goal — 5 pages in total. That selection is scan-driven, not a fixed crawl: which pages count as "relevant" depends on the goal you enter.

Only publicly accessible HTML is read — content that requires login, or that's injected client-side after the initial page load, may not be seen. Pages that fail to load are skipped and listed as warnings in your results, not silently dropped.

These are plain rule-based checks against your page HTML — no AI involved, and fully reproducible:

• Title tag presence and length (30–60 characters is a practical heuristic, not a hard Google limit)
• Meta description presence and length (90–165 characters, same caveat)
• H1 presence, canonical tag presence, HTML lang attribute
• Noindex directives (meta robots and X-Robots-Tag header)
• Image alt-text coverage
• Structured data (JSON-LD) validity
• Duplicate titles/descriptions across the pages scanned
• robots.txt and XML sitemap accessibility, and common misconfigurations (a sitewide disallow, invalid or cross-domain sitemap URLs, duplicates)

Everything else is generated by an AI model reading your scanned pages, and should be read as a considered judgment call — not a measured score:

• Business context: industry, audience, personas and primary offer, inferred from your page content. You can correct this directly with "Edit context" before re-running.
• Goal routing: which of the checks above and which strategies below are actually relevant to what you asked for — this tool intentionally skips checks that don't apply to your specific goal instead of running a fixed checklist every time.
• Keyword strategy: recommended search topics, each checked against your scanned pages and marked Found/Missing based on real text matching.
• AEO (answer-engine) opportunities: a qualitative read of how well your content addresses specific answer-style queries. This is not a measured citation rate from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews or any other live system — Search Operator doesn't query those systems.
• Prioritized actions: Impact/Effort/Priority ratings are the model's judgment, grounded in the evidence shown for each action, not a fixed scoring formula.

If you connect a Google account with Search Console and/or GA4 access (Settings → Search Console & GA4), the last 28 days of real data is pulled in during analysis:

• Search Console: total clicks, impressions and average position for the connected property, plus your top ~25 actual search queries with their real clicks/impressions/position.
• GA4: total sessions, conversions and users, plus your top landing pages by sessions.

This is real measured data, not AI judgment. It's used to mark recommended keywords with their real clicks/impressions/position when a close match exists in your actual queries, and to ground the keyword, AEO and prioritized-action sections in real numbers instead of only page-content inference. It does not change the answer-engine disclaimer in Section 03 — Search Console and GA4 measure Google organic search and site traffic, not AI answer-engine citations. Without a connection, every section works exactly as described above, purely from page content.

Clicking "Turn this into a deliverable" on any recommended action makes one additional, targeted AI request that writes the specific content implied by that action (a rewritten title tag, a JSON-LD block, ad copy, a content outline, etc.), grounded in that action's own evidence. It does not re-scan your site.

• Without a connected Google account (Section 04), no historical traffic or ranking data is used — only what's on the page right now. Connecting adds real data, but only the last 28 days that Google's APIs return, not full history.
• Search Console / GA4 data covers Google organic search and the connected GA4 property's traffic only — not other search engines, paid traffic, or AI answer-engine citations.
• Every scan samples 5 pages (homepage + 4 goal-relevant links), not the whole site — large sites are not exhaustively crawled.
• AI-generated sections can be wrong or miss context your page content doesn't make explicit.
• Signed-in reports are saved to your account so you can revisit them later; without signing in, use "Download report" to keep a copy instead. See our Privacy Policy for full data handling details.
• Trend charts and competitor comparisons (see below) track our AI-judgment metrics (and, when connected, real Search Console / GA4 metrics) over time — the AI-judgment portion is not a fixed, precise score, and the same analysis run twice on an unchanged page can vary slightly.

What this tool measures today: deterministic technical checks (Section 02) plus one AI-generated read of your current content (Section 03), optionally grounded in real Search Console / GA4 data when connected (Section 04) — this is real measured search/traffic data, but it is not a full historical tracking system.

What's now available: if you're signed in, every analysis is saved, so re-running on the same site shows a trend of both the AI-judgment metrics (technical findings, AEO coverage, keyword coverage) and, once you connect Search Console / GA4, real clicks, impressions, average position and sessions over time — plus a comparison against a competitor site you choose to track (AI-judgment metrics only; we can't see a competitor's private Search Console or GA4 data).

What's not built yet: live querying of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini-with-search, or Google AI Overviews to check whether they actually cite you. That requires paid, metered API access to each of those systems (none of them offer this for free), so it's a deliberate roadmap item, not something this tool silently approximates today.