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Answer Engine Optimization

Free AEO Audit Tool

Run a 29-check audit of any site's AI search readiness in under 60 seconds. Technical, content, and authority signals, scored the way answer engines actually read you. No sign-up.

Methodology

Every check the audit runs, published

No black box: these are all 29 checks, grouped the way your score is grouped. The list mirrors the production auditor, so what you read here is what runs against your site.

29 is the full-coverage figure: the five detailed schema checks need JSON-LD present to evaluate (a site without structured data gets one consolidated schema check instead), and blog-dependent checks skip when there is no blog.

Technical (16 checks)

Can AI crawlers reach you, read you, and understand who you are? These checks cover the retrieval layer: bot access, rendering, and machine-readable structure.

Cloudflare AI blocking
Detects whether Cloudflare's bot defaults are challenging AI crawlers before they ever read your robots.txt.
robots.txt: AI search access
Confirms the crawlers that index for AI search (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) are allowed.
robots.txt: user-initiated bots
Confirms user-initiated fetchers (ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User) can open your pages when a real person asks.
robots.txt: training crawlers
Reports which AI training crawlers (GPTBot, CCBot, and peers) you allow or block, so that trade-off is a decision, not an accident.
Server-side rendering completeness
Verifies your content exists in the raw HTML. AI crawlers do not run JavaScript; client-rendered content is invisible to them.
WAF bot overlay
Checks whether a web application firewall is silently challenging the same crawlers your robots.txt allows.
XML sitemap
Confirms a sitemap exists and is referenced, so crawlers can enumerate every page you want read.
llms.txt
Looks for an llms.txt file describing your site to AI assistants: a low-cost discoverability hedge.
Page speed
Measures response time. Slow pages burn crawl budget and lose retrieval races to faster sources.
Meta descriptions
Checks pages ship real meta descriptions at a citable length.
Organization schema
Checks for an Organization node that tells engines whose site this is.
Person schema
Checks for author and founder Person markup, the structural half of E-E-A-T.
FAQPage schema
Checks question-and-answer markup that lets engines extract your answers cleanly.
Article schema
Checks articles carry Article or BlogPosting markup with dates and authorship.
Entity graph depth
Grades your Organization's sameAs links to independent profiles and encyclopedic anchors, the signal engines use to resolve who you are.
Schema @id connectivity
Checks your JSON-LD nodes reference each other into one connected graph instead of isolated islands.

Content (8 checks)

Once a crawler can read you, is there anything worth quoting? These checks cover extraction: whether your pages are structured the way AI answers are assembled.

FAQ content
Looks for visible question-and-answer sections, the format engines quote most readily.
Direct answers
Looks for self-contained direct-answer paragraphs that open pages and sections.
Answer blocks
Checks each heading is followed by a concise, extractable answer rather than a slow wind-up.
Question headings
Looks for headings phrased as the questions people actually ask AI engines.
Heading hierarchy
One H1, ordered H2s and H3s: the outline extractors rely on to chunk your page.
Content depth
Checks pages carry enough substance to be worth grounding an answer on.
Content freshness
Checks for dated, recently updated content. Engines prefer sources that look current.
Data attribution
Checks statistical claims cite their sources. Attributed data is what earns citations.

Authority (5 checks)

Would an engine trust you as a source? These checks cover the entity: who you are, whether that is stated plainly, and whether anyone else corroborates it.

Brand description
Checks the homepage states plainly what the company is, matched by Organization schema.
About page
Looks for a real about page anchoring the entity: who, where, since when.
Social proof
Looks for testimonials, reviews, or customer evidence engines can corroborate elsewhere.
Blog section
Checks for a maintained blog, the surface where topical authority accrues.
External citations
Checks you cite outward to authoritative sources instead of being a dead end.

For the concept behind the tool, see the glossary entries for AEO audit and AEO score, or the full guide to improving an AEO score.

Frequently asked questions

What does the free AEO audit tool check?

It runs 29 checks across three categories: 16 technical checks (AI crawler access in robots.txt, Cloudflare and WAF interference, server-side rendering completeness, schema markup including the Organization, Person, FAQPage, and Article types, entity-graph depth, sitemap, llms.txt, page speed, and meta descriptions), 8 content checks (FAQ sections, direct-answer paragraphs, answer blocks, question headings, heading hierarchy, content depth, freshness, and data attribution), and 5 authority checks (brand description, about page, social proof, blog presence, and external citations). Every check is listed on this page.

How long does an AEO audit take and do I need to sign up?

Under 60 seconds, and no. Enter a domain and the audit fetches your live site, runs the 29 checks, and returns an overall score with technical, content, and authority sub-scores. No account, no credit card, no email required to see your score.

Are all 29 checks always run?

29 is the full-coverage figure. The five detailed schema checks need JSON-LD on the site to evaluate; a site with no structured data gets one consolidated schema check instead, and a site without a blog skips blog-dependent checks. Most established B2B sites hit the full 29.

How is an AEO audit different from an SEO audit?

An SEO audit optimizes for ranking in a list of blue links; an AEO audit optimizes for being read, extracted, and cited inside AI answers. The overlap is real (crawlability, structure, speed), but AEO adds checks SEO tools skip: whether AI crawlers specifically can reach you, whether your content survives without JavaScript, whether answers are extractable as self-contained blocks, and whether your entity graph lets engines resolve who you are.

What do I get beyond the free score?

The free audit shows your overall score, the three category scores, and top findings. The AI-Advisors platform runs the full audit with page-level detail, prioritized recommendations with implementation guides, scheduled re-audits that catch regressions, and score projections for planned fixes. Plans start at $49 per month with a 14-day free trial.

Why does my site score low if it ranks well on Google?

Because the failure modes are different. The most common gaps we see on well-ranking sites are client-side rendering that AI crawlers cannot read, a WAF or Cloudflare default silently challenging AI bots, no direct-answer paragraphs for extraction, and a thin entity graph. Each of those is invisible to classic rank tracking and directly suppresses AI citations.

The audit finds the gaps. The platform closes them.

The Answer Engine Optimization module runs the same audit continuously: page-level detail, prioritized recommendations with implementation guides, scheduled re-audits that catch regressions, and score projections for planned fixes.