An AEO audit is a structured review of whether a website is built to be cited by AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews. It examines the technical infrastructure that determines whether AI crawlers can access your site, whether AI engines can understand it, and whether your content is positioned and structured in a way that allows it to be extracted and cited in AI-generated answers.
It's the AEO equivalent of an SEO technical audit—and for most sites, the findings are significant.
AEO in plain language
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization aka Answer Engine Optimisation) is the practice of optimising a website to be cited by AI answer engines, not just ranked by search engines like Google. The two disciplines share some foundations but have meaningfully different technical requirements.
For a fuller explanation of what AEO is and why it matters, see What is an AEO consultant?. For the purposes of an AEO audit, what matters is that the requirements are specific and auditable. There are clear things a site either has or doesn't have that determine whether it gets cited.
What an AEO audit actually reviews
A proper AEO audit isn't a single check. It's a review across six distinct layers, each of which can independently prevent a site from being cited by AI engines.
Crawler access. Whether AI crawlers—GPTBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Claude), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), and Google-Extended (AI Overviews)—are explicitly allowed in the site's robots.txt. This is the single most common and most easily overlooked failure point. Roughly a quarter of websites are accidentally blocking the crawlers that determine AI visibility. If the crawlers can't get in, nothing else matters.
JavaScript dependency. Whether the site's core content is delivered in the initial HTML response or rendered by JavaScript after page load. AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript. A site whose content depends on JavaScript to render may be technically empty to the engines that determine AI discoverability. This is the most significant structural issue in JS-heavy frameworks when not using server-side rendering correctly.
Schema and entity graph. Whether the site has correct, complete JSON-LD structured data—specifically a Person or Organisation entity, Service entities for each offer, FAQPage schema on relevant pages, and Article schema on content. Each entity should be linked internally via @id references so the engine sees a coherent, connected picture of who the business is. Missing or malformed schema is the most common reason a site is readable but not citable.
Entity signals. Whether the same name, title, location, and description appear consistently across the site's schema, copy, and external references. AI engines build confidence in a source by recognising it repeatedly. Inconsistent signals mean the engine can't form a confident entity model—and sources without confident entity models don't get cited. This is one of the core AEO benefits of doing the structural work properly: once the entity is established, confidence compounds.
Content structure. Whether key pages lead with a direct, self-contained answer in the first 40–60 words. Whether FAQ blocks exist on relevant pages and are correctly marked up with FAQPage schema. Whether the content hierarchy is designed for machine extraction rather than narrative flow. This is the closest thing to a generative engine optimization checklist—a page-by-page review of whether each section is formatted to be lifted and cited.
llms.txt and sitemap. Whether the site has an llms.txt file at the root (an emerging standard that allows you to specify how AI systems should interpret and use your content), a current sitemap.xml, and whether those files are referenced correctly in robots.txt.
What comes out of a good AEO audit
A well-executed AEO audit produces three things.
A clear current-state picture. Which of the six layers are present and functioning, which are absent, and which are present but incorrectly implemented. Not a generic traffic-light report—a specific, accurate diagnosis.
A prioritised fix list. What to address first, second, and third for maximum early impact. Some fixes (crawler access, robots.txt) take minutes for a competent AEO consultant and unblock everything else. Others (schema implementation, content restructuring) take longer but produce compounding returns. The priority order matters, and maintenance is key as a site scales.
Implementation-ready specifications. For schema work in particular, an audit should produce the actual JSON-LD that needs to be implemented—not a description of what to implement. A developer should be able to take the audit output and work from it directly, without further interpretation.
This is what separates a real AEO audit from a tool report. Tools flag what's missing. A proper audit tells you exactly what to put in its place.
Who needs an AEO audit
Any business that is actively trying to appear in AI-generated answers and isn't—or that suspects it has answer engine optimization gaps but doesn't know where—needs an audit before doing anything else.
Specifically:
- Established businesses using ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity to check their AI visibility and finding their competitors but not themselves
- Sites that have done SEO work but remain invisible in AI-generated answers—because SEO and AEO have different technical requirements
- Sites that recently launched or relaunched and have never had an AEO consulting review
- Sites that look beautiful but aren't generating traffic, leads, or sales
- Any site running on a JavaScript-heavy framework or a closed platform—Kajabi, Squarespace, Wix, Systeme.io, or WordPress with a visual page builder like Elementor or Divi—these are the highest-risk configurations for answer engine optimization gaps
How to get an AEO audit done
AEO auditing is part of the Infrastructure Audit—the half or full-day diagnostic that reviews a site's discoverability infrastructure across all layers. It covers crawler access, schema, entity signals, content architecture, llms.txt, and Core Web Vitals, and produces a prioritised fix list in plain language, ready to hand to any developer.
If your site isn't appearing in AI-generated answers and you don't know why, the Infrastructure Audit is where you find out.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AEO audit?
An AEO audit is a structured review of whether a website is built to be cited by AI-powered answer engines—ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews. It examines crawler access, schema and entity signals, JavaScript dependency, content structure, and llms.txt configuration. The output is a prioritised list of what's wrong and exactly what needs to change, in language any developer can work from.
How long does an AEO audit take?
A focused AEO audit—covering crawler access, schema, entity signals, content structure, and technical configuration—typically takes a half day. When the scope extends to include content architecture, full systems review, and business infrastructure, a full day is more appropriate. The right scope is determined in a short pre-audit conversation.
What does an AEO audit cost?
The Infrastructure Audit, which includes a full AEO and discoverability review, starts from $1,500 for a half-day session. The scope and investment are confirmed before any commitment is made.
What is the difference between an SEO audit and an AEO audit?
An SEO audit reviews the factors that affect search engine rankings—backlinks, keyword targeting, on-page optimisation, technical crawlability for Googlebot. An AEO audit reviews the factors that affect AI citation—schema markup, entity signals, AI crawler access (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot), JavaScript dependency, and answer-first content structure. The two disciplines overlap in some areas but have distinct requirements that a standard SEO audit typically doesn't cover.
How often should you run an AEO audit?
At minimum, whenever the site undergoes significant changes—a redesign, a framework migration, new pages, or changes to hosting and deployment. For businesses actively building AI visibility, a light-touch review every six months is reasonable, since the standards and crawlers in this space are evolving quickly. The first audit is the most important: it establishes the baseline.