The AEO checklist.

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) means making your pages easy for AI engines to fetch, understand and quote. It has four parts: access (can they reach you), clarity (can they tell who you are), answers (do your pages answer buyer questions directly) and proof (does the rest of the web agree).

One point per check, 40 points, multiplied by 2.5 for a score out of 100. Fix in this order: access, clarity, answers, proof. A blocked crawler makes everything else moot. Checks marked hypothesis are things practitioners report that nobody has proven. Test them yourself.

Download the scorecard (CSV) ↓

Group 1 · checks 1 to 10

Access

Can AI crawlers reach the page?

1. 1Check 1: robots.txt loads with a 200 status at /robots.txt.
2. 2Check 2: You know which AI crawlers you want to allow and have written a rule for each, rather than a blanket block by accident. (List the current bot names from each vendor's own documentation and check the date.)
3. 3Check 3: Search-related bots and training bots are treated as separate decisions. Blocking training does not have to block search retrieval. Check each vendor's docs.
4. 4Check 4: Key pages return 200 to a plain curl with a normal user agent, with no login wall, cookie wall or geo wall.
5. 5Check 5: The main content is in the HTML the server sends, not only drawn by JavaScript after load. Test: curl the page and search for your headline.
6. 6Check 6: No noindex or X-Robots-Tag on pages you want cited.
7. 7Check 7: Important pages are in sitemap.xml, and the sitemap is listed in robots.txt.
8. 8Check 8: Your CDN or firewall isn't blocking bots by default. Check your security rules and logs for AI user agents.
9. 9Check 9: Pages load in a reasonable time and don't time out under a simple fetch.
10. 10Check 10: Canonical URLs are correct, and old URLs redirect with a 301.

Group 2 · checks 11 to 20

Clarity

Who are you, and what do you do?

1. 11Check 11: The home page says in one plain sentence what you are, who it's for and where you operate.
2. 12Check 12: Your company name is spelled the same everywhere: site, LinkedIn, X, directories.
3. 13Check 13: An About page names the founders or team and the location.
4. 14Check 14: Organization JSON-LD with name, url, logo and sameAs links to your real profiles.
5. 15Check 15: Each product or service has its own page with a plain definition in the first 2 sentences.
6. 16Check 16: Pricing, or a clear price range, is on the page. Engines and buyers both skip pages that hide it.
7. 17Check 17: Contact details and a way to reach a human are on the site.
8. 18Check 18: A short llms.txt points to your most useful pages. Support for it varies by engine; it costs little, so add it and don't rely on it.hypothesis
9. 19Check 19: The structured data validates, and matches the visible text on the page.
10. 20Check 20: No contradictions between pages (prices, claims, product names).

Group 3 · checks 21 to 30

Answers

Does a page answer the question directly?

1. 21Check 21: You have a list of 30 to 50 real buyer questions (see the prompt panel guide) and know which page answers each.
2. 22Check 22: Each target page opens with a direct 2 to 3 sentence answer before the story.
3. 23Check 23: Headings are written as the questions buyers ask.
4. 24Check 24: Comparisons are in real HTML tables, not images.
5. 25Check 25: Definitions, steps and lists use proper list markup.
6. 26Check 26: Each page states who it is for and who it isn't for.
7. 27Check 27: Claims carry a source, a date or a method on the page.
8. 28Check 28: An FAQ section exists where it truly helps, and the visible questions match any FAQ schema.
9. 29Check 29: Pages show a "last updated" date, and you update it only when content actually changes.
10. 30Check 30: Each page has a named author or owner where that makes sense.

Group 4 · checks 31 to 40

Proof

Does the rest of the web agree with you?

1. 31Check 31: You appear on the third-party sites that AI engines cite for your category. Find them: ask each engine your category questions and list the cited domains.
2. 32Check 32: Your profiles on those sites are complete and consistent with your site.
3. 33Check 33: You have real reviews on at least one platform buyers use. (Never buy or fabricate them.)
4. 34Check 34: You've published at least one original piece of data or a method others can cite.
5. 35Check 35: Named customers or case studies, only with written consent.
6. 36Check 36: Your founders or experts have bylines or profiles elsewhere on the web.
7. 37Check 37: Wikipedia, Wikidata or industry directories: present where you qualify. Never create promotional entries.
8. 38Check 38: Press or podcast mentions are linked back to your site.
9. 39Check 39: Competitor and category pages that rank for your buyer questions are reviewed, and you know which sources they use.
10. 40Check 40: Video: key explainers are on YouTube with a transcript and chapters, and embedded on the matching page. Citation share from video varies a lot by engine, so test on your own prompts.hypothesis

We ran it on ourselves

Our own access score, 28 October 2026.

We tested checks 1 to 10 on citerlabs.com before publishing this. At first, check 5 failed: the HTML our server sent held a heading and one sentence, so an AI crawler that does not run JavaScript saw almost none of the page. We fixed that the same day. Now six pass, two fail (checks 2 and 3, per-crawler rules we have not written yet), one is partial and one we could not verify from outside.

Checks 11 to 40 have not been scored on our site yet. We will add them as we test.

Then measure it

Ten minutes, every month.

1. Write 10 questions a buyer would ask.
2. Ask each one 3 times on 3 engines.
3. Log whether you were mentioned, whether you were cited (a link to your site), and which competitors and domains appeared.
4. Repeat monthly with the same questions. One run proves little, because AI answers vary from run to run.

Our full method is on the method page. This checklist is not a guarantee of any ranking or citation, and AI engines change. Check each vendor's current crawler documentation before changing access rules. This is not legal advice.

Questions

What is the difference between AEO and GEO?

In practice the terms overlap. We use GEO for the whole practice of getting named in AI answers, and AEO for the page-level work in this checklist.

Is llms.txt required?

No. See check 18: it costs little to add, but support varies by engine, so do not rely on it.

How long until I see a change?

We do not promise a time. Run the same prompts every month and compare the logged answers.