We just simplified the avisibli menu to three pillars
Today we shipped one of the biggest UX changes since launch. The avisibli sidebar dropped from 26 items to 7. Here's what stays, what moved, and why.
GEO is overwhelming. Our menu was making it worse.
Generative Engine Optimization is a young category. It comes with a long list of metrics and tools - some you check every day, most you don't. Until today, every avisibli account saw all of them in the sidebar at once: Visibility, Sentiment, Citations, Competitors, SERP, Reddit, Recommendations, AI Readiness, A/B Testing, Alerts, Content Briefs, Article Drafts, Citation Emails, Revenue Loss, Revenue Forecast, Lead Attribution, Revenue Impact, Board Reports, Ask Avi, Referrals - 20 destinations, plus Setup, Dashboard, Action Tracker, and a handful of footer links.
Some of those items were locked behind higher tiers. Some were unlocked but rarely visited. All of them competed for the user's attention every time the page rendered. The sidebar read as "things you can't do yet" more than "things you came here to do".
So we cut.
The new sidebar: 3 pillars of GEO + 4 control surfaces
Every avisibli account, regardless of plan tier, now sees seven items in the main navigation:
The three pillars - the questions GEO is built to answer
- Visibility - Am I being mentioned? When buyers ask AI engines questions about my category, does my brand show up? This is the headline metric.
- Sentiment - When I do show up, what's being said? Positive recommendation? Neutral mention? Comparative weakness? Sentiment is the difference between being cited as the leader versus being cited as the also-ran.
- Citations - Which sources do AI engines trust to answer questions about my category? The answer is rarely your own site. It's third-party publishers, listicles, Reddit threads, comparison content. If you're not in those sources, AI engines won't cite you.
If you only check three things in avisibli, check these. They map directly to the three things AI engines actually do: pick which brands to mention, decide how to describe them, and choose which sources to cite as evidence.
The four control surfaces - what's happening now
- Dashboard - Today's score, this week's trend, the next few actions to take. Your AI-search command centre. Built to be readable in 60 seconds when you sit down at your desk.
- Action Tracker - The kanban board for everything in motion. Pending work, in-progress recommendations, completed wins. Who's doing what and when each piece is due. We shipped this earlier this week and it's already become a daily destination for our agency users.
- AI Readiness - The technical-health audit that backs the three pillars. Schema, crawlability, content structure, llms.txt - the things AI engines look for when deciding whether to cite your site. Free tier gets a basic Tech-SEO check; paid tiers unlock the 20+ check suite with AI-generated fix code.
- Setup - Tracked prompts, competitors, workspace settings. The configuration layer that everything else runs on top of. You'll visit this when something needs adjusting, not every day.
Seven destinations. That's the daily surface area for any avisibli user, whether you're on Free or Enterprise.
What moved to "More features"
Everything else - sixteen secondary destinations - is now folded into a single collapsible "More features" drawer at the bottom of the navigation. Click to expand, pick what you need, click again to collapse it.
The drawer is grouped by tier. If you're on Free or Starter, you'll see what each tier unlocks (with prices) so you can decide whether the upgrade is worth it for the specific feature you'd use. If you're on Enterprise, you see the same drawer with no prices - because what would we be selling you on? You already have it all.
Items inside the drawer that you don't have access to are dimmed out. Items you do have access to look exactly like the main-nav items. The drawer isn't a "you can't" gate - it's a "you don't need this every day" filter.
What stays in the bottom-of-sidebar footer
Settings, Glossary, Homepage, and (for super admins) Ops Panel. Same as before, just trimmed of items that didn't earn their spot.
Why this is the right trade
The argument against this change: discoverability drops. New users won't see Reddit Monitor or Revenue Forecast unless they expand the drawer. Some features get less surface area.
The argument for this change: focus compounds. The thing that matters - the three pillars and the daily-decision tools - is now legible at a glance. The thing that doesn't matter every day is one click away. We're not hiding features; we're not pretending they're more important than they are.
If you're an Enterprise user looking at our sidebar two months from now, you should still know exactly where to find Lead Attribution. It's in the drawer, under Enterprise. One click. The same place every time. The cost of that one click is small. The benefit of your daily nav being seven items instead of twenty is enormous.
Honest disclosure: this was your feedback
The brainstorm that led to this change came from a customer who looked at our sidebar, looked at Peec.ai's nine-item sidebar, and asked: "why are we showing this much?" The answer at the time was "because we built it and we're proud of it", which is not a real answer. We mocked four directions, prototyped two, picked the simplest one that didn't break any URLs or sales motions, and shipped it.
If you have similar friction in any avisibli flow, tell us. The fastest way to make a product feel less overwhelming is to listen to the people getting overwhelmed by it.
What's next
- Smarter "View only" badges in the drawer. Right now we show a "View only" badge on Recommendations when you have data but lack full feature access. We'll extend that to other features (Audit, Reddit, Revenue) so the drawer tells you which items have data waiting for you, not just which tier they live in.
- Drawer state memory. Today the drawer collapses on every page navigation. We'll persist the open/closed state per session so users who like browsing the full feature list don't have to re-expand it.
- Workflow-stage grouping (Phase 3). An alternative IA we mocked but didn't ship: organise the navigation by Monitor / Diagnose / Act / Prove user-journey stages instead of by feature category. We'll measure whether the simplified menu solves the focus problem first; if it doesn't, this is the next iteration.