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.
About the AEO and GEO Audit
This AEO audit checks whether answer engines can actually use your page: whether your robots rules admit AI crawlers, whether structured data is valid, whether content is quotable, and whether agent-facing files exist.
An AEO audit asks a different question from a traditional SEO audit. Answer engine optimisation is about being quotable — whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews can reach your page, parse it, and lift a self-contained answer from it with attribution.
The first check is access, because nothing else matters if it fails. Many sites block GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot in robots.txt without realising, and a Cloudflare AI-scraper toggle can block them at the edge even when robots.txt permits them. Content-Signal directives matter too: ai-input=no explicitly tells assistants not to use the page in an answer.
Then the audit looks at quotability: whether pages open with a self-contained answer rather than a preamble, whether FAQ and HowTo structured data is present and valid, whether headings are phrased as questions, and whether /llms.txt exists so agents can discover the site at all.
How to use the AEO and GEO Audit
- Enter your URL. Provide the page or site to audit.
- Check crawler access first. Confirm robots.txt and edge rules admit AI crawlers.
- Review the quotability findings. Look at answer-first structure and structured data validity.
- Fix and re-audit. Address the access issues before the content ones.
AEO and GEO Audit features
- Tests seven answer-engine crawlers against your robots.txt
- Reads Cloudflare Content-Signal directives
- Checks for /llms.txt and XML sitemap
- Detects JSON-LD, FAQPage, Organization and BreadcrumbList schema
- Tests Markdown content negotiation
- Scores question-shaped headings and answer-first structure
- Shows the exact directive or tag found for every check
Frequently asked 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.