Lighthouse++ - A Search and Generative Engine Optimization Tool for VSCode

Sammanfattning

Search engine optimization (SEO) remains an important challenge for e-commerce businesses in the ever-expanding and competitive World Wide Web (WWW) landscape. Theemerging AI-driven information retrieval trends have added new dimensions to the WWWutility and further complicated the SEO problem.Traditional SEO is largely performed using external tooling, disrupting the flow as developers move back and forth between environments. In addition, current tools do notadequately consider the evolving AI-driven search landscape.This thesis presents the design and implementation of Lighthouse++, a Visual StudioCode (VS Code) extension for automated analysis and improvement of webpage qualitywith a primary focus on on-page SEO and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Thesystem is built around Google Lighthouse and extends it with AI-assisted suggestions, aset of custom metrics, and an exploratory GEO component intended to provide heuristicfeedback rather than predictive ranking-based estimates.In this regard, the thesis proposes a GEO-oriented evaluation framework based on semanticsimilarity and source visibility, intended to capture how webpage content may align withretrieval and answer generation in large language model systems. The developed extensionaudits webpages, identifies technical and structural issues, and generates suggested codechanges intended to improve Lighthouse-related outcomes while also exposing GEOrelated feedback as an exploratory complement to traditional SEO analysis. Finally,Lighthouse++ comes with improved usability by enabling developers to code and testtheir websites for S&GEO in their IDEs.The project demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed tool by evaluating and showingimproved metrics across 80 pages from 18 different websites. The evaluation shows anincrease in all metrics and that AI-assisted SEO and GEO are possible.