By Mehdi HassanWhat should an AEO audit include?
An AEO audit should include six parts: a baseline prompt test, a technical access check, a money-page content review, an off-site mention review, a measurement check and a ranked list of fixes. Together they show where AI engines get your brand wrong, why, and what to change first.
AEO stands for answer engine optimization: getting your brand cited and recommended accurately in AI answers. The audit is the diagnosis. Our guide to AEO and GEO services cost explains how audits are priced next to sprints, retainers and builds; this checklist explains what you should get for the money, whether you buy one or run it yourself.
What is the AEO audit checklist?
The AEO audit checklist below covers the deliverables in the order a good auditor works through them. Each step produces evidence the next one depends on, so skipping ahead weakens the findings.
Run a baseline buyer prompt test
Write 20 to 30 prompts real buyers ask, such as "best X for Y", "X vs Y" and "how much does X cost". Run each in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode, and record whether you're mentioned, how you're described and which URLs are cited.
Check crawler access and rendering
Confirm robots.txt allows Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. View page source to check content is in the HTML; many AI crawlers don't run JavaScript.
Check indexing
Review Search Console's page indexing report for money pages that are excluded, duplicated or blocked.
Review money pages for answerability
For the homepage, pricing, comparison and use-case pages, check whether each section answers its question in the first sentence or two, uses real HTML tables and describes the product consistently.
Review off-site mentions
List the third-party sources engines cite for your prompts. Note where competitors are mentioned and you aren't.
Check measurement
Confirm a GA4 channel group for AI referrals exists and that demo forms ask how buyers heard about you.
Rank the fixes
Order every finding by likely impact and effort, with an owner and the evidence behind it.
Why does the prompt test come first?
The prompt test comes first because it's the only part of an AEO audit that measures the outcome you care about: what AI engines actually say about you. Everything else in the audit explains the gap between that answer and the one you want.
The prompt set must stay fixed so it can be re-run monthly and compared. Engines differ in how many sources they use: Semrush's AI Visibility Index, based on 126 million prompts, found ChatGPT cites about 15 sources per answer against about 3 for Gemini. An audit that tests one engine misses most of the picture. Our guide to measuring AI search visibility covers share of voice, citations and mentions in more depth.
What should an AI visibility audit check on your pages?
An AI visibility audit should check that your money pages are readable by crawlers, answer buyer questions directly and describe the product the same way everywhere. These are the factors you control fully, and they matter most.
TripleDart's Q1 2026 study of 28 B2B SaaS companies found homepages earned 31.9% of LLM citations and 81.7% of AI-attributed leads, while general blog posts drew zero leads. So the page review should start with the homepage, then pricing and comparisons, before any blog content.
- Answer-first sections: each heading answered in the first one or two sentences. See how to structure content for AI search.
- Real tables: comparisons, pricing and specs in HTML tables, never images.
- Visible FAQs: real buyer questions with visible answers, as covered in FAQ sections that get cited.
- Consistent descriptions: the same core description of the product on the homepage, about page and listings.
- Freshness: a visible updated date on key pages. AirOps reports over 70% of cited pages were updated within 12 months.
For a deeper page-level method, our AI visibility website audit guide walks through each check, and building an AI-search-ready website covers structure and crawlability from the build side.
What are the red flags of a fake AEO audit?
The red flags of a fake AEO audit are deliverables built around llms.txt or schema alone, guaranteed citations, no prompt test and findings without evidence. These audits are cheap to produce and rarely change what engines say about you.
Red flag | Why it's a problem |
|---|---|
llms.txt is the main deliverable | Ahrefs found 97% of llms.txt files got zero requests; see our explainer on llms.txt |
Schema-only recommendations | Ahrefs' 2026 schema test found no lift: AI Overview visibility fell 4.6%, AI Mode and ChatGPT stayed flat |
Guaranteed citations | No provider controls what AI engines cite |
No prompt test, or one engine only | There's no baseline, so nothing can be measured later |
Findings without evidence | "Improve E-E-A-T" with no page, prompt or source attached is opinion |
No technical check | Rendering and indexing problems can block everything else |
Tool export with no interpretation | You're paying for a screenshot of software you could run yourself |
What a good finding looks like
A useful AEO audit finding names what was observed, the evidence and the change. For example: "In 6 of 8 comparison prompts, Perplexity cites a competitor's comparison table and none of our pages. We have no comparison page for that competitor. Fix: build one with an HTML table covering pricing, integrations and limits."
That example is illustrative, but the format is what to demand. If findings can't be written this way, the audit didn't collect enough evidence.
Should an AEO audit cover Reddit and off-site mentions?
Yes, an AEO audit should cover off-site mentions, including communities like Reddit, because AI engines draw heavily on third-party sources. In Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands, web mentions correlated 0.664 with AI Overview visibility, against 0.218 for backlinks.
The review should list which third-party pages engines cite for your prompts, where competitors appear and you don't, and which sources are realistic to earn. Reddit is volatile as a source: its share of ChatGPT citations reportedly fell sharply in August 2026 while staying stronger in Google. Our guide to Reddit and AI search covers whether startups should bother.
What should happen after an AEO audit?
After an AEO audit, someone has to change the pages, and that's where most audits stall. Decide before you buy who will rewrite copy, redesign layouts and update code, because a ranked fix list is only worth what gets shipped.
If your team can implement, work through the top five fixes and re-run the prompt set a month later. If it can't, look for a provider who does both. Our one-week SEO and AEO sprint shows what a week of diagnosing and fixing can cover, and how to choose an AEO agency lists the questions that separate builders from report writers.
