# How to Do an AEO Audit: Manual Step-by-Step Process [2026]

> A hands-on AEO audit process you can run yourself. Nine checks covering crawler access, schema, extractability and freshness — with the exact thresholds that matter.

## Key facts

- Time per page: about 45 minutes manually.

- Order matters: crawler access first — a blocked bot makes the other eight checks moot.

- Page type decides the checklist. A news article and a product page are judged on different schema.

- Freshness is a ranking signal, not hygiene: over 70% of AI-cited pages were updated within the last twelve months.

- Manual scales to about 20 pages. Past that you need an AEO audit tool.

## What is an AEO audit?

An AEO audit (Answer Engine Optimization audit) evaluates how effectively a page can be crawled, parsed and cited by AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. It differs from a technical SEO audit in what it optimises for: an SEO audit asks whether a page can rank, an AEO audit asks whether a model can extract a specific claim from it and attribute that claim back to you.

## Step 1: Can AI crawlers reach the page at all?

Fetch /robots.txt and check the agents individually. The ones that matter are GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended.

This is first for a reason. Every other item on this list is wasted effort if the crawler is disallowed, and a disallow rule is usually introduced by accident — during a migration, a staging-config copy-paste, or a blanket rule added to stop scrapers that catches legitimate AI readers too.

## Step 2: Does the page render without JavaScript?

Fetch the raw HTML and count the visible text. If a 200 KB response contains under a hundred words of text, the content is being assembled client-side and most crawlers will see an empty shell. This is the single largest structural failure in AEO and it is invisible in a browser, because your browser runs the JavaScript that the crawler does not.

## Step 3: What type of page is this?

Establish the content type before you judge the markup, because the correct checklist depends on it. A news report, a product page, a how-to guide and a job posting are cited for different reasons and carry different schema.

> Most AEO audit tools score every page against one fixed checklist. That is why a well-marked-up news article is often told to add Product schema — advice that is not merely useless but actively misleading.

## Step 4: Is the applicable schema present and valid?

| Page type | Expect | Bonus credit |

| --- | --- | --- |

| News article | NewsArticle, Organization | SpeakableSpecification, ImageObject, LiveBlogPosting |

| Blog / guide | Article, Organization | Person, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage |

| Product | Product, Organization | Offer, AggregateRating, Review |

| How-to | HowTo, Organization | ImageObject, VideoObject |

| Job posting | JobPosting, Organization | Place, MonetaryAmount |

## Step 5: Does the schema headline match the visible H1?

If your JSON-LD headline says one thing and the visible H1 says another, you have given the engine two competing answers to "what is this page called". Make them identical, word for word.

## Step 6: Are the freshness signals real?

Check that datePublished and dateModified exist, are machine-readable, and are honest. Research into AI citation patterns consistently finds that cited pages skew far more recent than the pages ranking for the same query, and that an absent or stale dateModified suppresses citation on any query where recency matters. Undated content is the worst case: the engine cannot judge freshness at all, so it assumes the answer is stale.

## Step 7: Can a model actually extract an answer?

Look for four things, in order of impact:

1. A key-facts block near the top. A short list or table above the fold is the densest extraction target on any page.

2. The core fact in the first 150 words — before the narrative wind-up, not after it.

3. Question-shaped headings. "What caused the outage?" beats "Incident background", because it matches how people prompt.

4. Lists and tables. Engines lift structured blocks cleanly and mangle long prose.

## Step 8: Is the content attributable?

Check for a named author with a real bio, and for linked external sources. Then check your quotes: statements set in <blockquote> with a named source get reproduced verbatim and cited, while the same statement paraphrased into your own prose tends to be absorbed into an answer without attribution. If you want the citation, quote the source properly.

## Step 9: Ask the engines directly

Take your twenty most important queries and run them in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Record who is cited instead of you. This is the only step that measures the outcome rather than the inputs, and it routinely contradicts what the on-page checks predict.

## When to stop auditing manually

Do the first three or four pages by hand — it teaches you what each signal means in practice, which no report will. Past roughly twenty pages the manual process stops being viable, and you need coverage across templates rather than depth on individual URLs.

Run these nine checks automatically against any URL, scored against the profile for that page type.

Run a free AEO audit

## Frequently asked questions

### How long does an AEO audit take?

About 45 minutes per page manually, if you follow a fixed process. Auditing a whole site by hand is impractical beyond roughly twenty pages.

### How often should you run an AEO audit?

Quarterly for a stable site, and immediately after any template, CMS or robots.txt change. Because freshness is itself a signal, pages left more than twelve months without review tend to lose citation share.

### What is the most common AEO audit failure?

Blocked AI crawlers in robots.txt — the one failure that makes every other optimisation irrelevant, and almost always introduced by accident.

### Do I need an AEO audit tool, or can I do it manually?

Do the first audit manually, because it teaches you what the signals mean. Use an AEO audit tool for site-wide coverage and for tracking change over time.

## Related reading

- The AEO audit checklist — the same checks as a printable list

- AEO audit vs SEO audit — what an SEO crawl misses

- What is Answer Engine Optimization?

- Schema markup for AI search