What is an AEO audit, and what does it check?

An AEO audit checks whether AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can read your site and describe your company correctly. It covers crawler access, structured data, an llms.txt file, whether the text is in the HTML, and a cold read of what a model says you do from your pages alone.

AEO Audit: What It Checks and What You Should Get

Access

Whether robots.txt allows the AI crawlers, and whether the server actually returns pages to them rather than a block or a challenge. A permissive robots.txt does not help if a firewall refuses anything that is not a browser.

Readability

Whether the main copy is in the HTML or added later by scripts many crawlers do not run, whether structured data declares the organization and its offerings, and whether an llms.txt file gives a short, accurate map of the key pages.

The cold read

Hand a model only your homepage text and ask what the company does, for whom, and with what proof. Compare the answer with how you describe yourself. Gaps here are copy problems, and they are usually the most valuable findings.

What you should get

A short list of fixes in order of effect, the exact lines or settings to change, and a re-check after they ship. Be wary of audits that promise rankings in AI answers: no one controls those, and an honest audit says so.

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