Find out why AI engines aren't quoting you. The AEO audit scans your pages for the structural, semantic and authority signals that decide whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini can lift your answers, then ranks the fixes.
Free on one page (report emailed to a work address). Multi-page scans run in the dashboard.
fieldnote.app4,571 creditsFN
AEO audit report
fieldnote.app · 3 pages shown
Illustrative data
AEO score
57
Pages scanned
48
Pages without FAQ
21
Fix first
Question headings
74
AEO score by pageout of 100
/pricing74
/blog/agency-crm66
/features/portal41
Fix queueby impact
FAQ schema missing on 21 pagesHigh
No Q&A format on product pagesHigh
Opening paragraph over 70 wordsMedium
Few entities or statisticsMedium
Optimised for citation byChatGPTClaudeGeminiPerplexity
What is an AEO audit?
An AEO audit is a check of how easily answer engines can lift your content as a direct answer. AI Rank Lab's AEO audit scores each page on eight groups of signals, including a short opening answer, question headings, FAQPage and HowTo schema, snippet-length passages, entities with sources and conversational tone, and returns an AEO score per page with the fixes ranked by impact.
It works as an AEO scanner and an SEO page scanner in one pass: the same scan also records the SEO and GEO signals that sit underneath, so you can see when a page fails for a technical reason rather than a writing one.
Answer engine
An answer engine is any system that replies with an answer instead of a list of links: Google's featured snippets and AI Overviews, voice assistants, and chat assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.
AEO
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is writing and marking up pages so those systems can find the question, extract a short answer and trust it.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) overlaps with AEO but focuses on being cited inside generated answers. The AEO/GEO/SEO analyzer scores both.
What the AEO audit checks
Answer engines don't rank pages, they lift passages. The audit looks at each page the way an answer engine reads it: can it find the question, the short answer, the proof and the markup?
Answer structure
Answer engines quote short, self-contained passages. The audit checks whether a page opens with a direct answer and breaks its content into pieces a model can lift.
Short first paragraph that answers the question
Featured-snippet fit: 40 to 60 word answers
Lists of 3 to 8 items and tables with headers
Step-by-step and definition patterns
Answer box readinessIllustrative
First paragraph: 38 wordsPass
Snippet-length paragraphs: 2Pass
Numbered stepsMissing
Comparison tableMissing
Questions and FAQ markup
Questions in headings, an FAQ section and FAQPage or HowTo schema tell answer engines exactly which question a passage answers.
Sample site: 21 of 48 pages have questions on the page but no FAQPage schema.
Entities, facts and semantic markup
Models trust passages that name things precisely and back them up. The audit counts entities, statistics, dates and cited sources, and the schema types that describe them.
Schema types present (Article, Organization, Product and more)
Named entities, statistics and dates
Cited sources and quotations
Semantic HTML: article, section, main
Semantic signalsIllustrative
Schema typesArticle, Organization
Named entities14
Statistics with a source1
Dates on pageFound
Conversational and voice readiness
Voice assistants and chat answers favour plain, spoken-style sentences. The audit measures sentence length and how conversational the copy reads.
Average sentence length (20 words or fewer)
Second-person, question and transition patterns
Readability of the passages most likely to be quoted
Voice searchIllustrative
Sentence length72
Conversational48
Natural questions63
Run your AEO audit in three steps
From domain entry to a scored report with a ranked fix list.
Finds FAQPage, HowTo, Article and Organization schema and flags pages where questions exist without markup.
Multi-page scans
Score up to 100 pages per scan for AEO, depending on plan. For a deeper technical crawl, SEO Auto Audit covers up to 5,000 pages at 1 credit per page and flags missing FAQPage schema.
Scheduled rescans
Multi-page scans on a verified domain can be set to re-run on a schedule, so new issues show up without a manual check.
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation — the practice of structuring your content so that AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini cite it in their responses. An AEO Audit scans your website for the structural, semantic, and authority signals that determine whether AI engines trust and reference your content.
How is AEO different from SEO?
Traditional SEO optimises pages for Google's crawlers and ranking algorithm. AEO optimises content for the way AI language models ingest, interpret, and cite information. AEO factors include authoritative writing style, structured Q&A formats, schema markup, factual accuracy signals, and content depth — not just keyword placement and backlinks.
What does the AEO Audit actually check?
Eight groups of signals on every page: answer structure (short opening answer, lists, tables, steps), FAQ presence (FAQPage and HowTo schema, question headings, FAQ sections), answer box readiness, featured snippet potential (40 to 60 word answers), voice search readiness (sentence length, natural questions), semantic richness (schema types, semantic HTML), entities (names, statistics, dates, cited sources) and conversational readiness. You receive a scored report with specific fixes ranked by impact.
How long does an AEO Audit take?
A single-page scan in the SEO Analyzer returns while you wait; the free audit tool emails its report link, which can take several minutes when the queue is busy. Multi-page scans (up to 100 pages) and SEO Auto Audit crawls (up to 5,000 pages) take longer the more pages they cover. Multi-page scans can be scheduled to re-run so you can track progress over time.
Will fixing AEO issues guarantee I get cited by AI engines?
AEO optimisation improves the likelihood that AI engines will trust and cite your content, but no tool can guarantee specific citations — AI engines are probabilistic by nature. What the audit does is remove the fixable technical and structural reasons your content gets passed over. To see whether engines actually cite you, track your prompts in Brand visibility.
Is the AEO audit free?
Scanning a single page with the free SEO, AEO and GEO audit tool is free. Site-wide crawls and saved reports run in the dashboard on credits. Signing up gives 100 free credits with no credit card; paid plans start at $69 a month with 10,000 credits.
What does an automated AEO scanner check compared with a manual AEO audit?
An automated scanner checks the same signals on every page in minutes: whether a short answer opens the page, question headings, FAQPage and HowTo schema, snippet-length passages, lists and tables, entities and sources, and sentence length. A manual audit adds judgement the scanner can't make: whether the answer is correct, whether the page answers the question buyers really ask, and how it compares with the pages AI engines cite today. Most teams scan first, then review the top pages by hand.
Do you offer AEO audit services?
AI Rank Lab is software, not an agency: you run the audit yourself and get the fix list. Agencies use it to deliver AEO audits to their clients, with white-label reports and a multi-brand dashboard.