Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of making a page easy for AI assistants to quote. Where SEO targets a ranked list of links, AEO targets being the cited source inside a generated answer.

What is the difference between AEO and GEO?

AEO focuses on winning the citation for a specific question. GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, focuses on the model knowing your brand as an entity before anyone searches.

Is this AEO audit free?

Yes. It runs without a login, and we don't store the URLs you check.

Why does my site score badly when my SEO is good?

The two overlap but are not the same. A site can rank well and still block GPTBot in robots.txt, ship no structured data, or render its content only in JavaScript — all of which stop answer engines cold.

A plain Markdown file at /llms.txt that tells AI agents what your site offers and where the important pages are. It is an emerging convention, cheap to publish, and almost nobody has one yet.

Should I set ai-train=no in Content-Signal?

That is a licensing decision, not a technical one. ai-train=no asks that your content not be used to train models while still allowing search and answer use. Setting ai-input=no is different and will stop assistants citing you.

Does blocking AI crawlers protect my content?

It stops compliant crawlers from fetching your pages, which also removes you from AI answers entirely. If you want referral traffic from ChatGPT or Perplexity, blocking their agents guarantees you get none.

Answer & Generative Engine Optimization

Can AI answer engines read your page?

An AEO audit checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews can reach, parse and quote your page. This tool tests crawler permissions, agent-discovery files, structured data and content shape, and shows you the exact directive or tag it found for every check.

Fetches the page plus its robots.txt, sitemap.xml, llms.txt and api-catalog. Nothing is stored.

What this checks, and why

Crawler access: Whether AI crawlers are allowed to read the page at all.
Agent discovery: Machine-readable entry points that tell agents what this site offers.
Structured data: Schema an answer engine uses to understand and attribute the page.
Quotability: Whether the content is shaped so a model can lift a clean answer.

Common questions

What is AEO?: Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of making a page easy for AI assistants to quote. Where SEO targets a ranked list of links, AEO targets being the cited source inside a generated answer.
What is the difference between AEO and GEO?: AEO focuses on winning the citation for a specific question. GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, focuses on the model knowing your brand as an entity before anyone searches.
Is this AEO audit free?: Yes. It runs without a login, and we don't store the URLs you check.
Why does my site score badly when my SEO is good?: The two overlap but are not the same. A site can rank well and still block GPTBot in robots.txt, ship no structured data, or render its content only in JavaScript — all of which stop answer engines cold.
What is llms.txt?: A plain Markdown file at /llms.txt that tells AI agents what your site offers and where the important pages are. It is an emerging convention, cheap to publish, and almost nobody has one yet.
Should I set ai-train=no in Content-Signal?: That is a licensing decision, not a technical one. ai-train=no asks that your content not be used to train models while still allowing search and answer use. Setting ai-input=no is different and will stop assistants citing you.
Does blocking AI crawlers protect my content?: It stops compliant crawlers from fetching your pages, which also removes you from AI answers entirely. If you want referral traffic from ChatGPT or Perplexity, blocking their agents guarantees you get none.