Why I Built AIDRank

A few months ago I noticed something in my own habits. I stopped typing questions into Google and started typing them into Claude instead. Not for everything, but for the questions that used to take ten blue links and a lot of scrolling to answer. One good question, one good answer, done.

That shift is easy to feel and hard to measure. So I tried to measure it, for my own site first, out of simple curiosity. I asked ChatGPT what it knew about a small project of mine. Nothing. Not a wrong answer, not an outdated one, just nothing. The model had never encountered it during training, so as far as that model was concerned, it did not exist.

That is a strange thing to sit with if you have spent any time on SEO. You can rank on page one of Google and still be a blank space to the model someone is now asking instead of Google.

The tool that didn't exist

I went looking for something that would tell me this directly. Plenty of tools would crawl my site, check my backlinks, audit my meta tags. None of them could tell me what an AI model actually recalled about my domain from training, because that question does not live in a crawler. A crawler visits a live page. A model's knowledge was frozen the day its training ended.

So I built AIDRank to ask that exact question. It queries Claude and GPT separately, with web search deliberately turned off, so the models can only answer from what they already carry, not from what they can look up in the moment. Each domain gets scored across eight separate metrics, from basic recognition to whether a model would recommend it unprompted, and the two models are shown side by side rather than blended into one number, because one model knowing you while the other has never heard of you is information worth seeing.

A low score is not an insult. It is information. It tells you the fastest growing way people find things has never heard of you, and that is worth knowing before you find out the hard way.

The part that actually annoyed me

While building this, I spent a lot of time inside other SEO tools, comparing how they price things. Almost every one of them works the same way: a monthly subscription, often not small, that keeps charging whether you log in that month or not. Stop paying, lose access to your own historical data. It is a reasonable business model. It is also not the only one, and it was not the one I wanted to build.

I wanted scanning to be free, permanently, for anyone. Not a trial, not a limited quota that resets your patience every 30 days. Just free. If you want to check your domain, or your competitor's, you should be able to do that without creating an account or reaching for a card.

The only thing that costs money is keeping a domain tracked over time, meaning it gets rescanned automatically every week and its history is saved in a dashboard. And even that is not a subscription. You buy a slot once, and it is yours for good, usually for less than a single month costs elsewhere. You can see the full pricing breakdown here.

I am not going to pretend this makes AIDRank a bigger business than a subscription would. It does not. But I would rather build something I would actually want to pay for myself, and a one-time price for a domain I care about is exactly that.

Where this stands today

AIDRank is new. I am the only person building it, which means it moves quickly in some places and slowly in others. The score measures recognition, not quality, and I have tried to be careful about that distinction everywhere on the site, because it matters. A low score is not a judgment on a business. It just means the model has not encountered it yet.

I built the directories for SEO and GEO experts and tools the same way, free to list, because the people doing good work in this space deserve to be findable too, and because I would rather this be useful to the community than just useful to me.

If you want to see where your own domain stands, it takes about thirty seconds and costs nothing to find out.