What Our Free 26-Point AEO Audit Actually Checks (And Why Each One Matters)
Before you run the free report at AEO Juice, here's exactly what it looks at — checkpoint by checkpoint — so you understand what you're getting back and what you can do with it.
The short answer: our 26-point AEO audit checks whether your website gives AI answer engines enough structured, trustworthy, and contextually rich signals to confidently cite you when someone asks a relevant question. It covers everything from your schema markup and page speed to how consistently your brand is described across the web. Think of it as a nutritional label for your AI visibility — not just a pass/fail grade, but a clear breakdown of where you're nourishing the engines and where you're leaving them hungry.
Now let's walk through the whole thing.
Why a Checklist Specifically for AEO?
Traditional SEO audits look at things like backlink authority, keyword density, and crawlability. Those things still matter. But AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — make citation decisions differently than a ranked list of blue links.
They're asking: Can I confidently summarize what this business does? Is this information consistent everywhere? Does this source look like the authoritative answer to this question?
Our 26-point report is built around those three questions: clarity, consistency, and authority. Every checkpoint traces back to one of them.
The Five Categories We Check
Category 1: Structured Data & Schema (6 Checks)
This is the technical backbone of AI visibility, and it's where a surprising number of businesses fall short.
Check 1 — Organization Schema
Is there a properly formatted Organization schema block on your homepage? This is where you formally introduce yourself to machines: your name, URL, logo, contact info, and social profiles. Without it, AI engines are guessing at your identity from surrounding text.
Check 2 — LocalBusiness Schema (if applicable)
If you serve a geographic area, do you have LocalBusiness markup with a verified address, phone, and service area? Perplexity especially leans on this for location-aware queries.
Check 3 — FAQ Schema
Do any of your pages use FAQPage schema? FAQ schema is essentially a direct pipeline to AI answer engines. You're handing them pre-formatted question-and-answer pairs they can pull almost verbatim.
Check 4 — Product or Service Schema Are your offerings described with structured markup, not just prose? Schema-tagged services are far easier to extract and cite than paragraphs of marketing copy.
Check 5 — Breadcrumb Schema This helps AI engines understand your site architecture and the relationship between pages — which matters when they're deciding how authoritative your content is on a given topic.
Check 6 — Schema Validation Even if schema exists, is it valid? A single syntax error can make an entire schema block invisible. We check against Google's structured data guidelines.
Category 2: Content Structure & Clarity (7 Checks)
AI engines read your content the same way a careful editor would: they look for clear claims, scannable structure, and direct answers to real questions.
Check 7 — Direct Answer Paragraphs Does your site open pages with a concise, citable statement of what you do and for whom? Pages that bury the lede rarely get cited. We check whether your key pages lead with quotable clarity.
Check 8 — Heading Hierarchy Are your H1, H2, and H3 tags logically structured? AI engines use headings to build an outline of your content. A broken hierarchy (H1 → H4 → H2) is like handing someone a shuffled manual.
Check 9 — Question-Based Headings At least some of your headings should mirror the phrasing of real questions your audience asks. "How does [your product] work?" outperforms "Our Process" for AI citation purposes because it matches conversational queries directly.
Check 10 — Content Freshness When were your core service pages last updated? AI engines, particularly Perplexity, weight recency. Stale pages signal stale expertise.
Check 11 — Reading Level & Clarity Score Dense, jargon-heavy writing is harder for AI to extract cleanly. We flag pages that score above a Flesch-Kincaid grade 12 as citation-unfriendly — not because simplicity equals quality, but because accessible writing gets pulled more reliably.
Check 12 — Thin Content Pages Pages under ~300 words rarely have enough substance to be cited. We identify pages that need expanding.
Check 13 — Topic Depth on Core Pages Does your homepage or key landing page comprehensively cover your category? We check whether the page answers the top three questions someone might ask about your type of business.
Category 3: Brand Consistency & Entity Signals (5 Checks)
AI engines build a model of your brand by aggregating information from multiple sources. If those sources contradict each other, the engine loses confidence and skips you.
Check 14 — NAP Consistency (Name, Address, Phone) Is your business name, address, and phone number identical everywhere it appears — your site, Google Business Profile, Yelp, LinkedIn, industry directories? Even a slight variation ("St." vs. "Street") creates ambiguity.
Check 15 — Brand Description Consistency Pull your one-sentence description from your site, your LinkedIn About section, and your Google Business Profile. Do they tell the same story? We check for meaningful divergence.
Check 16 — Google Business Profile Completeness GBP data feeds directly into Google's AI Overviews. We check completeness: category, hours, services, photos, and whether Q&A has been populated.
Check 17 — Social Profile Completeness LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter/X profiles with thin bios and no website links weaken your entity graph. We check that your primary profiles are complete and linked.
Check 18 — Wikipedia or Wikidata Presence For established brands, Wikidata entries are a significant trust signal. We flag if you're eligible but absent.
Category 4: Authority & Trust Signals (4 Checks)
These checks look at whether outside sources corroborate your expertise — the digital equivalent of references on a résumé.
Check 19 — Referring Domain Quality We look at whether you have backlinks from credible, topically relevant sources. AI engines use these as trust signals in much the same way traditional search engines do — except the threshold for "credible enough to cite" is arguably higher.
Check 20 — Press & Media Mentions Have credible publications written about you? Mentions in trade press, local news, or industry blogs are strong citation signals. We check for indexed coverage.
Check 21 — Review Volume & Recency Google, Trustpilot, G2, Capterra — consistent recent reviews tell AI engines that real humans interact with your business regularly. We flag review profiles that are sparse or stale.
Check 22 — Author & Expert Attribution Does your content have named authors with linked bios? E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals matter to AI citation logic. Anonymous content is harder to credit.
Category 5: Technical Foundations (4 Checks)
Even perfect content and schema won't help if the page doesn't load reliably or can't be crawled.
Check 23 — Core Web Vitals LCP, INP, and CLS scores. Slow or visually unstable pages get deprioritized across all engine types, including AI.
Check 24 — Mobile Usability AI-powered search is predominantly triggered on mobile. Pages with broken mobile layouts are both harder to crawl and harder to excerpt cleanly.
Check 25 — Crawlability & Indexation
Are your key pages indexed? Are there accidental noindex tags or robots.txt blocks hiding your best content from engines?
Check 26 — HTTPS & Security Still seeing HTTP pages in 2024 is a genuine trust flag. We verify that your site is fully secured and that there are no mixed-content warnings undermining it.
What the Report Output Looks Like
Each of the 26 checks comes back as one of three states:
- ✅ Passing — this signal is healthy and working for you
- ⚠️ Needs Attention — present but incomplete or inconsistent
- ❌ Missing — not found; this is actively costing you visibility
You also get a single AEO Score out of 100, calculated by weighting each check based on how strongly it correlates with AI citation likelihood. Schema and brand consistency checks carry more weight than, say, breadcrumb markup — because the evidence that they drive citations is stronger.
The report is designed to be read in about ten minutes and actioned without needing a developer. Many of the fixes — updating schema, rewriting an opening paragraph, completing a GBP profile — take under an hour.
What the Free Report Doesn't Do
Being straight with you: the free report is a diagnostic, not a treatment plan. It tells you what needs fixing with good specificity. It doesn't write the fixes for you, track your score over time, or monitor whether AI engines start mentioning you more often after changes.
That's what the Pro and Prime tiers handle — automated content calendars tuned to your AEO gaps, AI-generated schema and copy fixes, and weekly tracking of how often ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity cite your brand in relevant queries. But you don't need to think about any of that to get enormous value from the free audit. Most businesses find three to five high-impact fixes in the first read.
FAQ
How long does it take to run the free AEO audit? The report generates in about 90 seconds. You enter your URL and email, and it crawls your site and checks all 26 points automatically. No forms to fill out, no calls to book.
Do I need technical knowledge to understand the results? No. Each failing check comes with a plain-English explanation of why it matters and a concrete first step to fix it. If you can edit a Google Business Profile, you can action most of the recommendations.
What if I score really low — does that mean my SEO is broken? A low AEO score doesn't necessarily reflect your traditional SEO health. You might rank well in Google and still be invisible to AI engines. They're different games, which is exactly why a dedicated AEO audit is useful.
How is this different from a regular SEO audit? A standard SEO audit focuses on ranking factors: domain authority, keyword usage, technical crawl errors. Our audit focuses on citation factors — the signals that make an AI assistant confident enough to name and recommend you. There's overlap, but the emphasis is different.
How often should I re-run it? After making fixes, re-run it to confirm the improvements registered. After that, monthly is a reasonable cadence for most businesses — or whenever you make significant changes to your site or service pages.
Run Yours in 90 Seconds
Every checkpoint above gets checked automatically, against your actual site, based on the URL you submit. No estimates, no averages, no guessing.
The report is free. It takes a URL and 90 seconds. And you'll leave with a clearer picture of your AI visibility than most businesses ever bother to get.