AEO is the new SEO. Here's the 12-point audit we run first.

Three years ago, the only question that mattered was whether your page ranked. Today, it is also whether your page is the answer LLM-powered search assistants return when they are asked. Those are different questions with different mechanics.

AEO is the practice of making your content discoverable, citable, and quotable by Perplexity, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and the long tail of AI-powered answer engines that have replaced 20-40% of traditional search behavior.

We've run AEO audits on 40+ B2B websites in the last 18 months. Here are the 12 questions every audit answers.

Discoverability layer

1. Is your site crawlable by the major AI engines? Most LLM crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) respect robots.txt rules separately from traditional search crawlers. If you have a generic robots.txt from five years ago, you may be invisible to AI search.

2. Is your sitemap accurate and current? AI engines lean heavily on sitemaps to crawl efficiently. Outdated sitemaps mean outdated answers.

3. Are your URLs semantic? /how-to-evaluate-a-marketing-automation-platform is parsed easily. /page-id-447-2024 is not.

Structured data layer

4. Does your content have schema markup? Without schema, AI engines have to guess what your page is about. With schema, they're told.

5. Are your headings structured? A page with a clear H1, H2s, and H3s in logical hierarchy is parsed correctly. A page where every section is an H2 is parsed flat.

6. Are key facts isolated and citable? AI engines prefer to cite content where the answer is in a single clean sentence or short list. Long paragraphs that contain the answer in fragment form get skipped.

Content quality layer

7. Does each page answer one question clearly? A page titled "Marketing automation" loses to a page titled "How to evaluate a marketing automation platform."

8. Is the answer at the top? Inverted-pyramid structure. The answer in the first 50 words, the supporting detail after.

9. Are claims supported with sources? AI engines weight content that cites primary sources. Industry stats from named reports, customer quotes with named brands, public data.

Authority layer

10. Is your author entity strong? Real author names with LinkedIn profiles and visible expertise get cited. Bylines like "Admin" lose ground.

11. Is your brand cited by other sources? Press mentions, Wikipedia presence, podcast guest appearances, and industry-report citations all compound.

12. Are you the original source on any topic? Original research, proprietary frameworks, and unique data points are the strongest possible signal. AI engines will cite the originator over the rephrase every time.

How we score it

We score each question 0, 1, or 2.

• 18-24: Your site is AEO-ready
• 10-17: Significant gaps. AI engines are seeing you, but not preferring you
• 0-9: You are functionally invisible to AI search

The median score before engagement is 11. The median score 6 months after engagement is 22. The fix is rarely complicated. It is systematic.

If your organic traffic has flattened in the last 12 months while your competitors' has not, AEO is almost certainly part of the explanation.