Short answer
An AEO audit checks whether your website is technically ready for answer engines to crawl, understand, and extract useful answers from your pages.
It is a technical readiness audit. It does not guarantee rankings, citations, traffic, or visibility in any AI search product.
What is an AEO audit?
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. An AEO audit reviews the technical and content signals that help search engines, answer engines, and AI-assisted retrieval systems understand a page. It looks beyond one file or one tag and checks the full readiness foundation.
What an AEO audit checks
- Technical crawlability: status code, HTML response, title, meta description, canonical, and noindex rules.
- AI search files: LLMs.txt, LLMs-full.txt, sitemap.xml, robots.txt, and AI crawler access.
- Structured data: JSON-LD schema types, parse errors, and missing schema opportunities.
- Answer-ready content: H1/H2/H3 structure, FAQ sections, question headings, short answers, lists, and steps.
- Entity clarity: brand name, organization schema, og:site_name, and title/H1 consistency.
- Trust signals: author, published date, modified date, about, contact, privacy, and source links.
Technical AEO checklist
Page returns a successful HTML response
Title, meta description, canonical, and robots tags are clear
LLMs.txt, LLMs-full.txt, sitemap, and robots.txt are accessible where useful
GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, and Google-Extended rules are understood
JSON-LD schema uses relevant types such as Organization, WebSite, Article, FAQPage, Product, Service, or BreadcrumbList
The page has one clear H1 and useful H2/H3 question sections
Important answers are written in direct, short paragraphs
Entity signals clarify the brand, product, service, author, or publisher
Trust signals include author, date, about, contact, privacy, and source links where relevant
How to prioritize AEO fixes
Start with blockers that prevent a page from being crawled or understood: failed HTTP responses, noindex rules, missing title tags, broken canonical tags, blocked crawlers, and invalid JSON-LD. Then improve answer-ready formatting, schema coverage, entity clarity, and trust signals.
What not to expect
AEO is not AI visibility tracking, citation tracking, or a ranking guarantee. A technical audit helps you find gaps that are worth fixing, but AI search products decide what to crawl, summarize, cite, or rank using systems outside your control.