Another SEO meeting, a lot of words, and still no way to say what changed?

Our view: yes, as the base. The AI check lists the pages that assistants with web search return, so a site that is correct, well structured and easy to find should serve both search and AI answers. What changes is how you are found: by link in a list, and by name in an answer. The AI check shows the second one for your own company.

With the pages Google already shows. Connect Search Console, pull the last 90 days and list the pages with the most impressions. Write two questions your customers ask and one about your company, and run the first AI check. Then work on the top 10 pages before you plan new ones.

Your assistant sorts the Search Console data: pages with many impressions, searches at positions 8 to 20, and pages that are seen often but rarely clicked. Your team adds what the data cannot know: which pages sell, and which are about to change. Start with 10, and widen to 25 and then 50 once the first changes are measured.

Three things: access to the site’s Search Console, which needs a one-time setup with a Google Cloud project and a read-only sign-in; an AI coding assistant; and keys for the AI services the weekly check asks. On a large site, use each assistant’s own key, because only those send your market’s country with the search. One OpenRouter key is the simpler start. Optional keys add Bing, the live top 10 and Google’s own AI answers. Write access to the code is needed only when changes are made.

No. The checks and measurements work from the live pages and your Search Console data, on any system. You keep your CMS. The ready-made test suite needs a site built with the Croftweaver starter.

We do not promise a result or a date. Plan on about four weeks for a first pass on one section: a baseline, a first AI check, fixes on the 20 to 30 pages already seen, and a review. A grading run 3 to 6 weeks after shipping sets the prediction next to what happened. Search moves slowly, so read it over weeks.

In our view AI can take over much of the repeatable agency work, but not all of it, and Croftweaver does not try to replace the rest. AI is useful for the repeatable work: audits, structured data, drafts, checks and reports. On a corporate site it can do much of that work with people in charge. People still set the direction, decide which markets are worth pursuing, approve what the brand and legal team can say, build relationships and answer for the result. What changes is what you can check yourself: where the site stands, and what moved.

Croftweaver is built so that your assistant can do much of the work, with people in charge. It gives the assistant these steps: check the live site, find the pages Google already shows, add structured data, write guard tests and measure the result. It cannot decide which markets are worth pursuing, check a claim against your legal rules or earn trust for your brand. Those stay with your team and your partners.

Run the two measuring loops in-house: Search Console and the weekly AI check. The data is yours, and the numbers should not depend on who is paid to improve them. Keep what only you can know or approve in-house too: product facts, brand voice, legal sign-off, access to your experts, priorities and the technical platform. An agency adds most when it reads the results with you, benchmarks you against competitors, produces content at volume, and handles outreach and public relations. Both sides then work from the same numbers.

Share the facts and the checks, and change the site in small steps. The company hands over approved facts and brand rules once. The agency, or your own assistant, proposes each change as a draft your team can review. Guard tests, where the setup allows them, are written before the copy changes and say what done means. The weekly check shows what moved, and your own staging and sign-off decide what goes live.

The usual route is the CMS’s own interface for programs (its API), with an account that can write drafts but cannot publish; confirm that your CMS can do that before you rely on it. A workable setup is that the assistant writes each answer as its own entry, with its question, its answer, its source, its owner and the pages it belongs on. Your team reviews the draft and publishes it as usual. Croftweaver ships no connector for every CMS; connecting one is setup work.

A setup that works: it reads the content from two places and keeps a copy of both in one repository that a weekly job refreshes. Croftweaver does not ship that job yet (see the last question); you build it for your site. The CMS stays the source of truth: every change goes back into it as a draft, never into the copy. Scripts do the sweeps across all pages; the assistant reads the results, then works page by page, starting with the pages Google already shows.

If a site builds its text in the browser rather than on the server, a plain fetch sees empty pages, and a headless browser such as Playwright is needed. Many sites, including many built with Next.js, send their text from the server, so a plain fetch works; compare a plain fetch with the rendered page for your site before you rely on it.

It goes by several names: GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization) or AI SEO. It builds on SEO, not in place of it. For a large company it is a loop: a baseline of where the site ranks, a check of what assistants say about the company, fixes on the pages already seen, and a new measurement weeks later. It tends to work better when every page and every profile states the same facts.

Three things come up most often.

Answers that are hard to quote. Give an assistant short passages that stand on their own: a clear answer at the start of a section, a figure with its source, a table, a question with its answer. Split long marketing paragraphs into passages like these, and put every figure in the text as well as in any image. Structured data tells machines what a page is about, such as the company, a service or a product. It supports the visible text and does not replace it.

Facts that disagree. If one page says 500 clients and another says 700, an assistant may quote either, or neither. Keep one list of approved facts, each with a source and an owner, and have your assistant compare your pages with it. The weekly AI check shows what assistants already say about you, including any wrong figure they repeat.

A blurred position. If your pages describe the company in different words, an assistant may not be able to tell what kind of company you are or whom you serve. Croftweaver works out your positioning before any copy is written, and a check lists the pages in your rules that have lost it. For sites built with the Croftweaver starter that check is a test that runs on every change; for other sites the check reads the published pages.

A large company often speaks to several groups at once, for example customers, job applicants and investors. Each group gets its own positioning: what it would use instead, what you offer it, and why it should believe you. What stays the same for every group is the company itself: one name, one category, one set of facts.

Every page then belongs to one audience and carries that audience’s term in its title, its description and its main heading or opening paragraph. Where your CMS allows it, keep the audience as one field per page. A check reads the published pages in your sitemap (up to 1,000 by default), on staging or on the live site, and lists the pages your rules cover that have lost their term. Pages you exempt, such as legal pages, pages past the limit and pages it cannot read are not checked. Your team decides whether the page or the term needs to change.

The weekly AI check asks two questions per site today, plus one about your company. Your assistant drafts them from your homepage and, if you have one, your positioning, and you confirm or change the wording. If you are unsure which audience to start with, ask it to suggest one from your pages and the groups you serve. After you switch to another audience, the new weeks cannot be compared with the old ones, and checking several audiences side by side is not built yet.

Croftweaver ships the positioning method, and the test for sites built with its starter. The check of the published pages on any other system is part of the facts check.

Your team keeps one list of approved facts, each with a source and an owner. The facts check reads the pages in your sitemap, or a list of pages you give it, up to 1,000 by default. For each fact you list the words that go with it, such as “clients”, and the check compares the numbers it finds next to those words with the approved value. It sets aside a 0 unless the approved value is 0, and a plain year from 1900 to 2100 right after a © or a word such as “in” or “since” (“founded in 2016”) unless the approved value is in that range. It reports every mismatch with the page and the sentence it is in. It lists the pages it could not check, such as pages that returned an error, pages blocked by robots.txt and PDFs. It also looks for old names and claims that are still in use, and does the same for the profiles on review sites and directories that you add. The weekly AI check’s question about your company, read for accuracy, shows which wrong figure an assistant already repeats. After the cleanup, run the check weekly, and again after any change to a fact.

Every week, ask the same questions your customers ask, without naming the company, and count how often each assistant names it. The AI check does this for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and optionally Google’s AI Mode and AI Overview. Where an assistant allows web search, the check also lists the sources it returned; Gemini is asked from memory only. A third question asks what each assistant knows about your company; it is read for accuracy, not counted. The check counts mentions. It does not tell you whether an assistant recommends you.

Then those profiles are the next job. With web search on, the AI check lists the sources each assistant returned, so you can see which sites they are (Gemini is asked from memory only; the check does not request web search from it). If the sources are directories, review sites or press pages, make sure your profile there states the same facts as your site and links to it. Croftweaver covers directory and profile links, and requests for links from existing partners, sponsors and speakers. It does not do cold outreach or bought links.

Treat it like any other contributor. The assistant proposes a change, your team reviews it, and it goes through your own staging, approval and rollback. Have your security team approve the assistant first, and check each provider’s terms before confidential questions leave your network. The scripts make no call to a Croftweaver server, and the Search Console sign-in stays on your own computer.

Four roles matter. Your security team approves the AI assistant and checks the providers’ terms. The owner of the site or CMS gives access and runs staging and rollback. Brand and legal approve what the pages may say. And one person approves each change. In a four-week pilot on one section of the site, that can be a small group.

The questions of the AI check, two that your customers ask and one about your company, go to the AI services you choose: straight to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Perplexity with their own keys, or through OpenRouter. If you use SerpApi for Google’s AI answers, those questions go there too, and the search phrases for the live top 10 go to Serper or SerpApi if you use one. If you use the optional outside review of plans and changes, the text under review goes to the reviewing services too. Your assistant sees what you give it. The Search Console sign-in, the history and the saved answers stay on the computer that runs the skills. Nothing goes to Croftweaver. Check each provider’s terms before confidential questions leave your network.

No, it sits beside them. It adds checks you can run yourself on the public pages and your own Search Console data, so any report, from anyone, can be set next to numbers you can rerun.

Croftweaver is open source and free to use. You pay for your AI assistant and for the AI services the weekly check asks. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free.

Ready today, on any live site:

• Search Console and Bing reports: where each target search ranks, searches just below page 1, pages that are seen often but rarely clicked, and a weekly history.
• The weekly AI check: two questions your customers ask and one question about your company, asked of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and optionally Google’s AI Mode and AI Overview.
• The facts check: the numbers that sit next to the words you list for each approved fact, compared with the approved value on the pages of your sitemap (up to 1,000 by default), plus old names and claims that are still in use.
• The positioning check of live pages: the pages in your sitemap that your rules cover (up to 1,000 by default), each against the term its audience rule says it owns, in the title, the description and the heading or opening paragraph. Pages you exempt, pages past the limit and pages it cannot read are not checked.
• Skills your assistant follows for a technical SEO audit, structured data, answers AI can quote, a positioning check and copy.
• Reviews of plans and changes by independent AI reviewers before anything is built or merged.

Ready for sites built with the Croftweaver starter:

• The full test gate, including the positioning test and the tone test, on every change.

A method you apply, written for your site:

• Guard tests on other systems.
• A separate positioning for each audience: the method is run once per audience.
• The connection to your CMS through its API.

Not built yet:

• A weekly snapshot of every page’s text, so you see what changed on the site.
• More than two customer questions per site in the AI check.
• A ready-made list of the first 10, 25 or 50 pages: today your assistant builds it from the Search Console report.
• Moving an existing site onto the Croftweaver starter.