Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)

The same questions they used to type into Google, but phrased conversationally and with more context. Real examples from ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity logs include things like:

• "What's the best [service or product] for [specific type of customer]?"
• "How much does [service] cost in [location]?"
• "Is [brand] good for [use case]?"
• "What should I look for when choosing a [provider or product]?"
• "How does [brand] compare with [competitor]?"
• "What are the alternatives to [competitor]?"
• "Do I need [service] if I already have [related thing]?"

Your site needs to be findable and citable for queries like these - not just one-word keyword searches. Our audit checks whether your content is structured to be the answer to these conversational, comparison, and decision-stage questions, because that's where AI citation actually happens.

You get a written report covering eleven areas, from whether AI crawlers can reach your site to whether your schema markup matches what's actually on the page. The report leads with the three to five highest-leverage fixes ranked by effort and impact, then lists every finding with evidence (quoted from your site) and a concrete recommendation. It's written so you can act on it yourself, hand it to a developer, or take it to an agency.

Yes. Each finding has three parts: what we found, why it matters in plain English, and what to do about it. Some sections (like schema drift detection) are technical by nature, but the recommendations are always concrete: "Update this URL in this file to match this." If you're not technical, the report becomes your brief to a developer or agency. If you are technical, it's a checklist.

Free tools check whether things exist - does your site have schema, does it have a sitemap, does it have meta descriptions. Our audit checks whether what exists is correct, current, and coherent. Free tools won't tell you that your Product schema still shows last quarter's pricing, that your llms.txt links to three pages that no longer exist, or that your Organization schema is declared inline on every page without proper entity linking so AI engines see you as separate companies. Those are the findings that move the needle.

Schema is the structured data that tells AI engines facts about your site - product names, prices, business hours, FAQ answers. Most sites add schema once and never touch it again. When you update a page, the schema usually doesn't update with it. Result: your site shows one price to humans and a different price to AI engines. Your FAQ schema cites questions that aren't on the page anymore. Your "last updated" date hasn't moved in three years. We catch all of these and tell you exactly which pages drift, so you can fix them - or so we can flag them again next month if they drift again.

Yes. Every platform we've tested supports the changes our audit recommends. Most fixes are either CMS settings, custom code in the page header, or template updates a developer can do in under an hour. We don't recommend platform migrations.

For agencies and active marketing teams: weekly. For stable sites with infrequent updates: monthly. The recurring value is drift detection - catching the things that break between audits, like CMS updates that strip schema, content edits that introduce mismatches, or new blog posts published without proper markup. The first audit gives you a baseline; the second and subsequent audits tell you what's changed.

Three things. First, technical readiness for AI citation - being eligible to appear in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews answers in your space. Second, improvements to traditional SEO as a side effect - most AEO fixes are also good for Google ranking. Third, fewer silent breakages - schema drift, broken canonicals, accidentally blocked AI crawlers, soft 404s. Sites with these problems often don't know they have them until something obviously stops working.

Depends on your team. About 30-40% of findings are typically self-serve fixes (updating CMS fields, adding llms.txt, fixing meta descriptions). The rest usually need developer time - schema updates, template changes, hreflang implementation. We can recommend agencies and freelancers who specialize in implementing the changes, or you can take the report to your existing team.

No. Our audit is read-only - we fetch publicly available pages the same way Google or any other crawler does. We make a few requests per site (under a hundred for most audits). We don't run scripts on your site, don't change anything, don't even log in. If your site can handle Googlebot, it can handle our audit.

It can put you on equal technical footing. Whether AI engines then cite you depends on factors beyond pure technicals - content quality, authority signals, third-party mentions, your industry's competitive landscape. If your competitor has stronger entity signals (Wikipedia presence, more authoritative backlinks, more comprehensive content), technical fixes alone won't overtake them. But if you're invisible because of technical gaps and they aren't, this audit closes that gap.

All supported. Webflow specifically generates AI schema via its built-in AI tool, but it doesn't update when content changes - schema drift is especially common on Webflow sites. Our audit catches this. Framer and Squarespace have their own quirks (Framer's client-side rendering can hide content from AI crawlers; Squarespace has limited control over advanced schema). The audit identifies platform-specific issues and recommends platform-appropriate fixes.

Just give us the URL. We don't need login credentials, analytics access, or any internal data. The audit reads your site as a public visitor would.

Both options available. A one-time audit gives you a snapshot and a fix list. Ongoing weekly or monthly audits add drift detection - catching things that break between audits. Most agencies prefer ongoing; most one-off site owners start with a single audit and add monitoring later if they find the first one useful.

No, it complements them. The audit is a technical readiness check, not a strategy or content service. Many agencies use our audit alongside their work - it surfaces issues their existing tools miss (especially schema drift and entity graph problems) and gives them a concrete checklist of fixes they can implement and bill for. If your existing agency does AEO well, the audit will confirm that. If they don't, you'll know.

Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of preparing a website to be cited and quoted by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews. Unlike traditional SEO, which optimizes for ranked search results, AEO optimizes for being the source an AI quotes when answering a question. The goal isn't a ranking - it's a citation.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is about ranking in traditional search results - blue links on Google. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is about being cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity when they answer user questions. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is a near-synonym for AEO, used more often in academic contexts and by some American agencies. The technical work overlaps significantly - clean schema, semantic HTML, fast pages, clear answers - but the goals differ. SEO wants clicks; AEO wants citations.

No, and yes. SEO traffic is declining for many sites as AI answers absorb top-of-funnel queries, but Google still drives the majority of web traffic for most businesses, and AI engines themselves rely heavily on Google-indexed content to ground their answers. AEO doesn't replace SEO - it builds on the same technical foundations and adds a layer that prepares your content for AI extraction and citation. Sites that ignore AEO will increasingly find themselves invisible in AI answers even when they rank well in traditional search.

AI engines weight several signals when choosing what to quote: clean structured data (schema markup) that unambiguously describes your content, content written in an answer-first format with clear questions and answers, semantic HTML (proper headings, lists, tables) that makes content easy to extract, entity signals (who you are, where you operate, what you sell, all consistent across the site), and authority signals (citations, dates, author bylines, Wikipedia/Wikidata presence). The site doesn't need to "rank" anywhere - it needs to be technically ready for citation.

llms.txt is a proposed standard, similar to robots.txt or sitemap.xml, for giving AI engines a curated markdown-formatted guide to your site's most important content. If you want AI engines to find and cite the right pages efficiently, llms.txt is a 30-minute high-leverage addition. It's especially valuable for SaaS docs, content-heavy marketing sites, and anyone wanting AI engines to grasp their offering quickly. Adoption is still early but growing fast among forward-thinking businesses.

Schema markup is structured data added to your pages in a format AI engines can read directly. It tells AI "this is a product called X priced at Y," or "this is an article by Z published on date W." Without schema, AI engines have to guess from prose. With good schema, they have confident, citable facts. Schema is the single highest-leverage technical signal in modern AEO.

Possibly, but no audit can guarantee citations. What our audit measures is whether your site is technically ready to be cited - whether AI engines can crawl it, parse it, extract clean answers from it, and trust the entity signals. Citation depends on technical readiness plus content quality plus authority signals plus the user's specific query. We optimize the parts you control. Tools that claim to track or guarantee citations measure a different thing and aren't part of our audit.

Faster than SEO, generally. Schema fixes can be picked up by AI engines within days to weeks. llms.txt and indexability fixes are usually reflected within a single crawl cycle. Content restructuring (answer-first formatting, FAQ additions) takes longer - typically four to eight weeks before AI engines have re-crawled and re-evaluated. Realistic expectation: technical fixes within a month, content-driven improvements within a quarter.