An AEO audit checks whether your site can earn the answer position instead of a buried link. Google defines the target: "Featured snippets are special boxes where the format of a regular search result is reversed, showing the descriptive snippet first." AI assistants work the same way: one source gets quoted. We grade the signals that decide it, inside a 164-check audit of your whole site, up to 150 pages.
Answer engines do not give people a list of links. They give an answer, with one source cited. Either your content is that source, or a competitor's is, even on queries where your site technically "ranks".
Free Visibility Scan: whole site, up to 150 pages, no email. Full Report is a one-time $10.
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your content the direct answer in answer engines: Google featured snippets and AI Overviews, voice search, and AI chat tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. A large and growing share of searches end with an answer shown directly on the results page or inside an AI assistant. If your content is the source of that answer, you earn visibility and often a citation. If it is not, you can be completely absent.
An AEO audit finds both the structural problems (crawlers blocked, content hidden behind JavaScript, schema missing or broken) and the content quality gaps (no self-contained answer near the top, no question-style headings, no specific facts for the engine to quote). Both halves have to pass before you can compete for answer positions.
Read more in our guides: What is AEO?, What is GEO?, and AEO vs SEO: what's the difference?
The free AEO audit scans your whole site, up to 150 pages, with every finding ordered from most to least impact. Each one states what we checked, what we found, the grounding documentation and the exact fix. Gate failures appear first: if a crawler cannot reach you or your content only renders after JavaScript, every other finding is irrelevant until that is fixed.
The $10 Full Report unseals page-by-page detail with a PDF, prioritized action plan and AI-ready fix file. Related audits: the GEO audit for generative engines, the AI content audit for citability depth, and the AI search optimization hub for the whole picture.
An AEO audit checks whether your site meets the conditions that answer engines need to select it as a cited source. It covers AI crawler access, JavaScript rendering, passage structure, structured data validity, entity clarity and content citability. It is different from a standard SEO audit because it focuses on answer eligibility, not link ranking position.
The terms describe the same thing from slightly different angles. "AEO audit" emphasizes earning featured snippets and AI answer citations. "AI search audit" is broader and includes crawler access, entity signals and AI-specific technical requirements. Our audit covers both fully; the umbrella view lives at the AI search optimization hub.
No. The audit removes the blocks and improves the signals that make you citable. Whether any specific AI engine cites you on any specific query also depends on your topic authority, competition, and how the engine weights its sources on that query, factors we report as context, not as checks we can score for you.
The foundation is the same. Googlebot must be able to crawl and index you, your content must be readable without JavaScript, and your page must have a clear answer. Google's own AI documentation says the same foundational SEO best practices apply; there is no separate framework for AI Overviews.
A standard SEO audit focuses on ranking signals: title tags, Core Web Vitals, redirect chains. An AEO audit adds the citability layer: AI crawler policy, passage-level answer quality, structured data completeness and entity trust signals. We run both layers in one scan. Many well-ranked sites fail the second layer without knowing it.
Free scan of your whole site, up to 150 pages. No email. Worst problem first.
164 graded checks · SEO, AEO & GEO · the audit that shows its work