Geo SEO Toolkit

SEO and AI Search

Search visibility is a chain. A correct tag, green build, passing test, saved dashboard rule, accepted submission, or crawler 200 proves only its own layer. For each material symptom or URL class in scope, find the first broken owner in its real chain, fix that owner rather than downstream symptoms, then prove the result at the surface that carries the user outcome.

Start with the requested outcome

Establish before broad investigation:

• the exact domain, host, URL class, audience, and search surface in scope;
• whether the task is diagnosis, implementation, release, or measurement;
• the intended URL and content contract, including any migration or retirement;
• which repository, dataset, deployment, edge, and external property currently own that contract.

Resolve names from repository and provider configuration, not from prose. Before broader inspection, make one direct check that the current workspace or connected property owns the target. If it does not, locate or request the correct one instead of mining the wrong workspace. When local code is used to explain public behaviour, establish how that revision relates to origin and the deployed release.

Trace one contract end to end

Follow only the layers relevant to the symptom:

source fact or URL owner -> generated output or data -> committed revision -> deployed release (code + data) -> CDN/WAF/edge cache -> crawler access -> engine record -> measured outcome

Attribute every observed public response to the layer that actually produced it before changing any layer. Zone redirect rules, WAF and bot controls, managed robots files, platform URL normalisation, and edge caches can act before your application code — and your code's own tests can never prove that phase ordering. When two layers disagree, report both states instead of choosing the more convenient one. Do not audit every layer by default; stop expanding when evidence identifies the owner and the smallest coherent fix.

Work the root cause

1. Reproduce the exact symptom on the exact host, path, protocol, method, and relevant user agent or account property.
2. If this symptom was declared fixed before, first find the prior fix and the evidence that closed it. That shows what was proved and which later surface now contradicts it; do not repeat the same fix without explaining the gap.
3. Inspect current source, generated artefacts, runtime data, deployed revision, edge response, and dashboard state only as needed to locate the first divergence.
4. Find the existing owner of the URL, entity fact, indexability decision, or crawler control. Fix that owner instead of adding another override, then check the consumers affected by that decision.
5. Prove the change at the lowest seam that contains the risk, then at the public seam below.
6. Report each state separately. Never turn eligibility or submission into a claim of indexing, ranking, citation, traffic, or conversion.

The public seam gates "done"

Before calling any public-facing change complete, fetch the exact queryless canonical URL on the production host — GET, plus HEAD when redirects or caches are involved — and tie the response to the deployed release (and data generation) when the platform exposes one. None of the following count as that proof: a local build, a preview or platform-default host, a feature branch, a cache-busted or query-variant URL, a green test suite, a merged commit, an accepted submission, or a dashboard rule that reports "saved". Each proves only its own plane; say which plane you proved.

Non-negotiable judgement rules

• Where surfaces refer to the same URL identity, redirects, canonicals, internal links, sitemaps, alternate hosts or encodings, structured data, and notifications should agree. The chosen host or slash policy is project-specific.
• Canonical identity is a semantic decision. Current content or result-set equality alone does not prove that two routes are permanent duplicates.
• A redirect is right only when its target is a true equivalent that is itself indexable and relevant. Transport success (301 -> 200) with a wrong, noindex, or generic target is content loss, not migration.
• Missing, ambiguous, rejected, and not-evaluated data are not positive facts. Do not replace them with plausible employment terms, locations, dates, prices, categories, ratings, profiles, or business details — visibly absent beats silently invented.
• Normal crawlable HTML, links, and public content are primary. Crawler-only files, Markdown mirrors, bot routes, or schema do not repair a weak, false, or client-side-only page.
• A deterministic tool or test can be consistently wrong, and a check that re-reads the same generated literal or fixture is not independent evidence. Treat tool output as an observation whose assumptions must match the contract.
• Do not assign a composite SEO, GEO, citability, authority, or platform score unless the user supplied a calibrated model. Rank findings by demonstrated blockage, breadth, user impact, and fix leverage.
• A technical repair proves technical eligibility, not SEO success. Traffic and ranking changes are evidence to investigate, not proof of one cause.

Route to the smallest relevant reference

• For hosts, DNS/TLS, redirects, canonicals, robots, rendering, IDN and encoded URLs, sitemaps, migrations, generated output, CDN/WAF/edge behaviour, or caching, read references/public-delivery.md.
• For helpful content, internal discovery, entity truth, structured data, local business, portfolio evidence, images, or backlinks, read references/content-and-entities.md.
• For programmatic routes, jobs, changing inventories, semantic defaults, pagination, lifecycle, error pages, or notification feeds, read references/dynamic-pages.md.
• For Google AI features, ChatGPT search, Claude, Perplexity, bot categories, robots.txt policy, WAF and bot-management controls, IndexNow, or llms.txt, read references/platform-controls.md.
• For Search Console, analytics, ranking loss, release identity, fixtures, dashboards, or a claim that work is fixed or complete, read references/measurement-and-proof.md.

Read more than one reference only when the task crosses those boundaries.

Authority and finish

An audit or diagnosis does not authorise code changes, deployment, Search Console submission, provider settings, profile edits, outreach, or publication. An implementation request authorises the smallest coherent in-scope change and its proportionate validation. The indexability of a route class, a canonical consolidation, a retirement status, and a crawler policy are each product decisions: never change one as a side effect of another task, and stop and ask when the missing decision is the product owner's to make. Preserve unrelated repository and external state; report material incidental findings instead of fixing them unasked.

Finish with:

• the root causes and owning layers;
• what changed, including intentional URL or content-contract changes;
• evidence for each local, deployed, public, dashboard, and search-engine claim you actually make;
• any material gap that prevents a stronger claim.

Do not call the work fixed while the relevant public, cached, or external state still contradicts it — and if you cannot observe that state, say so instead of assuming it.