AEO Audit

What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your website discoverable, parseable, and citable by AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Traditional SEO targets a list of ranked blue links. AEO targets whether the model mentions your brand, cites your domain, and recommends you to the user. The two overlap, but AEO introduces new requirements: machine-readable signals (schema, llms.txt, semantic HTML), content depth that survives summarization, and rendering patterns that work without executing JavaScript.

This audit scores your site across six categories: Discovery (can the crawlers behind ChatGPT search, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot reach, index and quote your pages — robots.txt, firewall/CDN rules, noindex and nosnippet?), Rendering (is your content in the HTML, or does it only appear after JavaScript runs?), Structure (is your content machine-readable via schema, and does your brand exist as an entity in knowledge bases like Wikidata?), Content (can an answer engine quote it: question-led sections answered right away, lists and tables, concrete figures, short paragraphs, freshness), Technical (HTTPS, page weight and speed), and Other pages (the same page checks on a sample of your guides and inner pages from your sitemap, because assistants cite those far more than home pages; their average makes up 40% of the score). Checks are weighted: the ones that can keep you out of AI answers entirely count three times as much as polish, and checks that do not apply to a page type (a date on a home page) are not scored. Each failed check comes with a plain-English fix you can ship today.

Blocking AI training crawlers such as GPTBot costs points too, though less than blocking search crawlers: it does not remove you from AI search answers, but it keeps your own pages out of what models learn about you. A few results are shown for information only and never change the score: llms.txt (Google says it does not use it), FAQ schema (Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in 2026), and a Wikidata entry (most businesses don't qualify for one under Wikidata's notability rules).

The score measures readiness: whether AI assistants can reach, read and quote your site. A low score means they can't; a high one doesn't mean they will. What decides whether they actually cite you happens mostly off your site — how often your brand is mentioned in reviews, comparisons, videos and the press — and that is something only tracking real AI answers shows. Use the score as a baseline: run the audit now, ship the highest-impact fixes, re-run in two weeks. To see whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude actually mention you, and who they recommend instead, with historical trends and competitor benchmarking, see our paid plans.