Answer Engine Optimisation
The AEO audit
32 weighted checks across 5 readiness categories, each one returning a status with the evidence behind it. This is the part of AI visibility that is fully under your control — and it is free.
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 32 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 the audit is a readiness score, not a visibility score
Being usable comes before being used. This audit is exactly what the free AI Readiness Score measures — the obstacles on your side of the fence, all of them observable today, on your own site and on the competitor sites we crawl for comparison. A flawless site can still be absent from answers if nothing independent corroborates it and competitors dominate the sources a system retrieves. Being AI-ready doesn’t automatically make you AI-visible — but you can’t become visible without it. To see what the platforms actually say, a specialist reviews them directly with you during a consultation.
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 Readiness Methodology v1.0
Signal categories
The 5 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. The weight shown is the category’s share of your AI Readiness Score.
01Technical Readiness
8 checks · 25% of readiness weight
Can a machine reach the page and is it allowed to use it?
Reachability and response time, HTTPS, robots.txt directives, indexing permission in meta tags and X-Robots-Tag headers, XML sitemap presence, canonical declaration and a declared page language. This category carries the most weight for a blunt reason: every other signal is worthless if retrieval fails or indexing is forbidden.
02Entity & Brand Signals
8 checks · 25% of readiness weight
Have you stated plainly who you are, or left it to inference?
Organization and WebSite schema, a title that says who you are, a usable meta description, one unambiguous H1, an explicit description of what you sell, an About page a machine can find, and a location stated in machine-readable form. Structured data is the only part of a web page where you declare facts rather than imply them.
03Content Authority
6 checks · 20% of readiness weight
Is there enough substance to be treated as a source?
Content depth, topic breadth, internal linking that expresses how your pages relate, references to sources outside your own site, a real heading hierarchy, and image alt text. Several distinct subheadings is the threshold where a page reliably offers more than one extractable section.
04Answer Readiness
6 checks · 20% of readiness weight
Is this written in a shape an answer can be taken from?
FAQ schema, question-style headings, answer-first writing, breadcrumbs, breadth of structured data types, and social preview markup. 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.
05Trust Signals
4 checks · 10% of readiness weight
Does anything corroborate that you exist and can be reached?
A contact page, real published contact details, a physical postal address, and sameAs links to authoritative profiles elsewhere. Contactability functions as a trust signal in its own right, and independent profiles are what convert "a business claims this" into "this is the case".
Weights are the category weights used by the scoring engine. Within a category, each check carries its own points. 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
Beyond the AEO layer
AEO is the layer you control directly. Three related questions build on 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
Whether the platforms name, recommend and describe you correctly is reviewed by a specialist, directly on each platform, during a consultation.
Read moreChange over time
A site audit is stable between deployments, while AI answers shift over time — so it pays to re-check regularly and read the trend.
Read more
Questions
Questions about AEO
AEO stands for 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 it quotable inside somebody else's answer. The techniques overlap heavily — clean markup, clear headings and crawlable pages help both — but the target differs: a ranked link versus a sentence in an AI-generated answer.
A Not tested result means the evidence could not be retrieved, which is different from it being absent. A robots.txt request that times out, a homepage behind an aggressive bot filter or a sitemap returning a 403 all produce Not tested. Those checks are left out of the score entirely rather than counted as failures, and the reported confidence level reflects them instead.
Enough to notice: these 32 checks make up the whole AI Readiness Score, each carrying points inside one of the 5 readiness categories. A missing FAQ schema or a noindex directive moves your score materially. An unreachable homepage matters most of all, because everything else depends on it — so the checks beneath it are reported as Not tested rather than failed.
The AEO audit measures whether your pages can be used as answers once an AI system retrieves them — the part of the process you control. What ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI currently say about you also depends on corroboration and competition, and a specialist reviews that directly with you in a free consultation.
A Warning is worth fixing, but rarely urgent: it means the signal exists but is weak, or is absent in a way that can be defensible. A twelve-character title tag, two H1 headings, or no LocalBusiness schema on a business that trades nationally would each earn a Warning rather than a Fail. Warnings score half credit, so clearing them is a steady way to lift your score.
A perfect AEO score removes every obstacle on your own pages, which gives you the strongest possible starting point. Being AI-ready doesn’t automatically make you AI-visible — but you can’t become visible without it. AEO governs whether a system can use your page once it has retrieved it; whether it retrieves you in the first place also depends on independent corroboration, citation patterns and competition in your category. A specialist can show you how those factors look for your business in a consultation.
The audit reads your homepage, robots.txt and sitemap. The homepage is the page AI systems most commonly retrieve for an entity-level question — who is this business, what do they do, where are they — so it is the right place to start. The sitemap check also reports how many URLs you declare, giving a view of how discoverable the rest of your site is.
Audit your answer-engine readiness
All 32 checks run in the free assessment, with the evidence shown for each one.