AEO audit

Will answer engines cite your pages? Free AEO readiness check, then the full audit.

Answer engines quote one passage and name its source. Enter your domain and the question-shaped keyword you want to be the answer to, and see whether the engines can read you at all. No signup.

Enter one keyword only

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The free check is the site-level half of an AEO audit. The passage-level review is the paid report. See a sample.

What an answer engine does with a page

A search engine returns the page and the reader decides. An answer engine (Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Gemini) reads several pages, selects the passages it trusts, composes one answer and names its sources. The page is used as a quotation, not visited as a destination. AEO is making sure the quotable passage exists, can be found, and is attributed to you.

The passage test

For a question you want to own, open the page that should answer it and apply five tests. Is the question a heading? Does the first sentence under it answer the question, or introduce the topic? Could the paragraph be pasted into a chat window on its own and still make sense, at roughly 120 to 160 words, with no “as mentioned above”? Does the page carry FAQPage structured data repeating that question and answer word for word? Can the answer engines’ search crawlers, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, read the page? The second test is the one most pages fail: the answer is in paragraph three, after two paragraphs on why the question matters.

What the AEO audit covers

Site level, in the free check

Crawler access for the ten AI user agents, llms.txt, and whether the homepage’s title, description and H1 name the business and contain the keyword you typed. If these fail, nothing at the passage level can be cited, so they come first.

Passage level, in the report

Which of your pages address the questions behind your keywords; whether each has a direct-answer passage or needs one; the FAQ and structured-data gaps; and what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity answer today when asked your primary keywords (ChatGPT alone for the rest), with the sources they cite and what those sources have that you do not. The What to Build section lists the passages to write; the 90-Day Roadmap orders them.

Fixes, in order of return

  1. Answer first, then explain. Move the direct answer to the first sentence under the heading. Costs nothing.
  2. One question, one heading. A heading that asks the question (“How much does an audit cost?”) is matched more easily than one that names the topic (“Pricing”).
  3. FAQPage structured data that matches the visible text. The same words, not a summary. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results for most commercial sites in 2023; the assistants still read the block.
  4. Date and attribute the page. A last-updated date in markup and a named organization.
  5. Allow the crawlers. Everything above is moot behind a Disallow.

The ten questions at /faq follow these rules: one question per page, direct answer first, 120–160 words, FAQPage schema.

Questions

What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?

Answer engine optimization is structuring a page so an assistant can take one passage from it and present that passage as the answer to a question. SEO aims to rank a page for a query; AEO aims to have a paragraph quoted, by Google AI Overviews, by Perplexity with a citation, or by ChatGPT search. The mechanics are concrete. The question is a heading. The first sentence under it answers the question, without preamble. The passage is complete on its own at roughly 120 to 160 words, so it can be lifted without losing meaning. The page carries FAQPage or similar structured data that repeats the visible text exactly. And the crawlers behind the answer engines are allowed to read the page. If any of these is missing, the passage is unlikely to be used, however good the rest of the page is.

What does an AEO audit check?

An AEO audit works at the level of passages. For each question you want to be the answer to, it checks whether a page addresses it, whether the question appears as a heading, whether the first sentence under that heading answers it or introduces it, whether the passage stands alone at a citable length, and whether structured data repeats the same question and answer. Around that it checks the site-level conditions without which none of this matters: crawler access in robots.txt, an llms.txt file, and a homepage that says what the business is. Then it asks the answer engines the questions and records who they cite today. The free check on this page covers the site-level conditions. The paid report covers the passage-level review and asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity your primary keywords directly, with a ChatGPT-only pass over the rest.

Is AEO different from GEO?

They overlap and are often used interchangeably, but the emphasis differs. Generative engine optimization is site-wide: can the engines read the site, do they understand what the business is, is there evidence elsewhere that corroborates it. Answer engine optimization is passage-specific: for this question, is there a paragraph on this site an engine would quote as the answer. A site can pass a GEO check, with crawlers allowed, entity clear and structured data present, and still fail AEO for every question that matters, because its pages are written as marketing rather than as answers. The reverse also happens: good FAQ pages behind a robots.txt that blocks the crawlers. A Viscovery report covers both, because the fixes are cheapest made together.

The site-level view: GEO audit. How the score is computed: methodology.