Answer Engine Optimisation
The AEO audit
Twenty-four weighted checks across seven signal categories, each one returning a status with the evidence behind it. This is the part of AI visibility that is fully under your control.
What Answer Engine Optimisation means
An answer engine does not want your page. It wants one paragraph out of your page, phrased in a way it can reuse, attached to something it can cite. AEO is the practice of making sure that paragraph exists, is easy to locate, and is attributable to a business whose identity is unambiguous.
In practice that splits into three jobs. The first is access: the page has to be retrievable and permitted. The second is declaration: the facts about your business — legal name, location, services, the questions you answer — have to be stated in a machine-readable form rather than implied by layout and imagery. The third is shape: the prose has to put the answer first and carry headings that mark where each answer begins.
None of this is speculative. Every one of the twenty-four checks below measures something that is observably read by search and AI crawlers today. That is deliberate: AEO is the part of AI visibility where the mechanism is known, which is why it is the first thing we audit and the first thing worth fixing.
Why AEO is only 10% of the score
Because being usable is not the same as being used. A flawless site can still be absent from answers if nothing independent corroborates it and competitors dominate the sources a system retrieves. AEO readiness removes the obstacles on your side of the fence; the remaining 90% of the AI Says Score measures what actually happens in the answers themselves.
The four statuses
- PassFull credit
The signal is present and within the range that makes it useful. Nothing to do.
- WarningHalf credit
Present but weak, or absent in a way that is defensible for your kind of business. Worth clearing, rarely urgent.
- FailNo credit
Absent, or actively working against you — a noindex directive, a blanket robots.txt block, no structured data at all.
- Not testedExcluded
The evidence could not be retrieved. Removed from the calculation entirely and reflected in your confidence level instead.
How readiness is scored
Every testable check contributes its weight multiplied by its status value — 1 for Pass, 0.5 for Warning, 0 for Fail. That total is divided by the sum of the weights of the testable checks and expressed out of 100. Untested checks are removed from both sides of the division, so a site we could only partially read is scored on what we could actually verify rather than penalised for what we could not.
AI Says Scoring Methodology v1.0
Signal categories
The seven categories we audit
Each check belongs to exactly one category, and each category answers a different question about how legible your site is to a machine.
01Crawlability
5 checks · 31% of readiness weight
Can a machine reach the page and is it allowed to use it?
Reachability and response time, canonical declaration, robots.txt directives, XML sitemap presence, and whether the page carries a noindex instruction in a meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header. This category carries the most weight for a blunt reason: every other signal is worthless if retrieval fails or indexing is forbidden.
02Metadata
3 checks · 13% of readiness weight
Is there a clean, correctly-sized summary of what this is?
Title tag length and substance, meta description length and substance, and Open Graph tags. We check ranges rather than presence alone: a title under about twenty characters rarely states who you are and what you do, and one over sixty-five is likely to be truncated when quoted.
03Structure
4 checks · 15% of readiness weight
Can a machine find the section worth quoting?
A single descriptive H1, a real H2 hierarchy with enough subheadings to create distinct quotable sections, internal linking that expresses how your pages relate, and image alt text. Four or more H2s is the threshold where a page reliably offers more than one extractable section.
04Schema
6 checks · 28% of readiness weight
Have you stated plainly what you are, or left it to inference?
JSON-LD presence, then Organization, LocalBusiness, Product or Service, FAQ and Breadcrumb types specifically. Structured data is the only part of a web page where you declare facts in a machine-readable form instead of implying them in prose. Organization schema carries the highest weight in this category.
05Entity
2 checks · 8% of readiness weight
Is there a primary source for who you are and how to reach you?
An About page linked from the homepage, and discoverable contact details — a contact page, an email address, a phone number or a postal address. About pages are disproportionately used as the basis for AI descriptions of a business, and contactability functions as a trust signal in its own right.
06Answerability
3 checks · 15% of readiness weight
Is this written in a shape an answer can be taken from?
Question-style headings, answer-first writing, and overall content depth. The answer-first check measures the length of the first paragraph after your first H2 — a useful proxy for whether you state the answer immediately or make a reader wade through preamble. Machines do not wade.
07Authority
1 checks · 5% of readiness weight
Does anything independent corroborate your claims?
sameAs profile links declared in your structured data, pointing to authoritative profiles elsewhere. Three or more independent profiles is the threshold for a Pass. This is the narrowest category on the site audit because most authority signals live off your own site and are assessed under Citations & Authority instead.
Weight shares are approximate and rounded — they describe each category’s portion of the readiness component, not of the overall score. See the full list of individual checks.
Sequencing
The order to fix things in
Some AEO fixes unblock others. Doing them out of order wastes effort on work that cannot take effect yet.
First
Unblock retrieval
Any Fail in crawlability. A noindex tag, a disallow-all robots.txt or an unreachable homepage makes every other improvement invisible. This is usually a single-line change and it is always the first thing to do.
Second
Declare your identity
Organization schema, then LocalBusiness if you serve a geographic market, then sameAs links to profiles that corroborate you. Until a machine can resolve who you are, it cannot confidently attribute anything it reads to you.
Third
State what you sell
Product or Service schema, plus explicit service and location statements in body copy. Inference from marketing language is the most common source of inaccurate AI descriptions.
Fourth
Make the page quotable
Question-style headings, an answer in the first paragraph after each one, FAQ schema where you genuinely answer questions, and enough subheadings that a page offers several distinct extractable sections.
Fifth
Tidy the metadata
Title and description lengths, Open Graph tags, canonical declarations, alt text. Individually small weights, collectively a few points, and cheap to complete once the substantive work is done.
Scope
What the AEO audit does not cover
AEO is the controllable layer. Three things sit outside it, and each has its own page.
Retrieval and citation
Whether generative systems actually fetch and cite you depends on sources beyond your own site. That is the GEO question, and it is far less well understood.
Read moreWhat answers actually say
Observed presence, recommendation and accuracy across platforms are measured in the full report, not in a site audit.
Read moreChange over time
A site audit is stable between deployments. AI answers are not, which is a separate measurement cadence altogether.
Read more
Questions
Questions about AEO
AEO is Answer Engine Optimisation: structuring a page so a machine can lift a correct, self-contained answer out of it. SEO aims to make a page rank in a list of results. AEO aims to make a page quotable. The techniques overlap heavily — clean markup helps both — but the target differs: a ranked link versus a sentence in somebody else's answer.
Because the evidence could not be retrieved rather than because it was absent. A robots.txt request that times out, a homepage behind an aggressive bot filter or a sitemap that returns a 403 all produce Not tested. These checks are excluded from the score calculation entirely — they are not counted as failures — and they reduce the reported confidence level instead.
Each check carries its own weight inside the AEO Readiness component, and that component is 10% of the overall AI Says Score. Weights range from roughly 0.02 for breadcrumb markup up to 0.10 for basic reachability. So a single missing FAQ schema moves the overall score by a fraction of a point, while an unreachable homepage or a noindex directive is severe.
A Warning means the signal exists but is weak, or that it is absent in a way that is defensible. A title tag of twelve characters, two H1 headings, or no LocalBusiness schema on a business that trades nationally all warrant a Warning rather than a Fail. Warnings score half credit, so clearing them is worthwhile but rarely urgent.
No, and the audit does not claim that. AEO readiness governs whether a system can use your page once it has retrieved it. Whether it retrieves your page in the first place depends on factors outside your site — independent corroboration, citation patterns, competitive context. AEO removes the obstacles you control; it cannot manufacture demand for your page as a source.
The audit reads your homepage along with robots.txt and your sitemap. The homepage is the page AI systems most commonly retrieve for an entity-level question, so it is the right place to start. The sitemap check reports how many URLs you declare without fetching each one.
Audit your answer-engine readiness
All twenty-four checks run in the free assessment, with the evidence shown for each one.