Full Audit Pipeline
How Paceghost Works
Section titled “How Paceghost Works”Paceghost treats every website as an execution environment — not just a document index. Our methodology combines real browser execution, AI-powered analysis, and triple-pillar benchmark measurement.
The 5 Pipeline Steps
Section titled “The 5 Pipeline Steps”Step 1 — Crawlability Check
Section titled “Step 1 — Crawlability Check”Paceghost fetches your site’s robots.txt, llms.txt, and ai.txt files and checks which AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PaceghostBot, Googlebot, PerplexityBot, and others) are allowed or blocked. The result is a crawlability status: fully open, partially blocked, or fully blocked.
If robots.txt blocks PaceghostBot, the audit halts here — we respect your site’s directives. llms.txt and ai.txt are displayed as informational signals.
Step 2 — Website Snapshot
Section titled “Step 2 — Website Snapshot”A real headless browser visits your domain and captures a screenshot, the full DOM structure, page metadata (title, description, headings, links, schema markup), and raw HTML. This is the factual record of what the page looks like at the time of the scan.
The snapshot is the input to Step 3. It also lets you verify that the crawl is seeing the correct version of your page — not a cookie-walled or JavaScript-broken version.
Step 3 — Website Analysis (Synthetic Domain Profile)
Section titled “Step 3 — Website Analysis (Synthetic Domain Profile)”The snapshot content is sent to an AI model to produce the Synthetic Domain Profile (summary, branded/unbranded keywords, user-intent queries). Separately, Paceghost computes a deterministic E-E-A-T score, built from five on-page measurement pillars — directly from the page’s structure (schema markup, outbound citations, original media, content density, and first-person language), not from a model’s opinion. See the E-E-A-T Score page for how each pillar is measured.
The output is a Synthetic Domain Profile — a structured result derived from your real DOM content, not from model training data. It includes:
- AI-generated one-sentence summary of your site
- Branded keywords — your brand, product names, etc.
- Unbranded keywords — topics relevant to your domain
- User intent queries — what users might search to find you
- E-E-A-T scores (Trustworthiness, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Experience signals)
Important: The Synthetic Domain Profile is NOT what an AI model “knows” about you from its training data. It is what the model extracts from your actual page content at scan time.
Step 4 — Visibility Benchmark
Section titled “Step 4 — Visibility Benchmark”The keywords from your Synthetic Domain Profile are run through three search channels simultaneously:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) — Traditional search results from several search engines.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) — AI-augmented search results and AI overviews from several providers.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) — Direct LLM queries testing what several AI models say about your domain when asked directly.
For each query and each engine/model, we record:
- Whether your domain appears in results (domain found / domain cited)
- What position or rank
- What snippet, summary, or citation is shown
Both linked and unlinked citations are detected via triple-pass brand matching. Results are measured at a single point in time per audit.
The number of endpoints and models included scales with your tier — see the Endpoints chapter.
Step 5 — Create Report
Section titled “Step 5 — Create Report”All data from Steps 1–4 is compiled into a downloadable report package:
- PDF — Executive summary with scores, charts, and key findings
- JSON — Full data bundle for programmatic use
- CSV — Zipped export for spreadsheet and BI tool import
- Public share URL — A link you can share with stakeholders
Report files are retained for 30 days. The underlying audit data (crawlability results, snapshot, analysis, benchmark responses) is retained permanently.
Full Audit
Section titled “Full Audit”Running all 5 steps in sequence is called a Full Audit. Only the Crawlability Check is free; the Snapshot, Analysis, Benchmark, and Report steps each consume credits.
AI Models & Search Endpoints
Section titled “AI Models & Search Endpoints”Higher subscription tiers access more AI models and search endpoints, producing broader and more accurate benchmark results. See the AI Models page for how we use models, and the Endpoints chapter for what each tier includes.