AEO Audit Checklist: How to Audit Your AI Visibility
The short answer
An AEO audit checks five areas: AI crawler access, content extractability, structured data, trust signals, and entity presence. Work through them in order — access first, since a single robots.txt or WAF block makes everything else moot. Finish by probing live AI answers to confirm whether you're actually cited.
1. AI crawler access
- ▪robots.txt allows GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended.
- ▪No CDN/WAF rule blocks AI bots at the edge.
- ▪Live fetch returns 200 for each AI user-agent, not just browsers.
2. Extractability
- ▪Main content renders in raw HTML (not JavaScript-only).
- ▪One H1 per page; question-shaped H2s with the answer in the first paragraph.
- ▪Short, self-contained paragraphs; FAQ blocks; high content-to-chrome ratio.
- ▪llms.txt present and well-formed.
3. Structured data & trust
- ▪Valid JSON-LD: Organization, FAQPage, and Product/Article where relevant.
- ▪Entity linking via sameAs/@id.
- ▪Visible authorship and machine-readable publish/update dates.
- ▪An About page and outbound citations.
4. Entity & verification, then probe
Check third-party presence (reviews, directories) and consistent brand descriptions; a Wikipedia/Wikidata entity is the strongest signal. Finally, probe live AI answers with your buyers' questions to confirm whether the fixes actually earn citations.
cited? automates this entire checklist — 18 audit checks plus live probing — and returns a prioritized fix list for free.
Frequently asked questions
+What's the most common AEO audit failure?
Blocked AI crawlers. A robots.txt rule or a CDN/WAF AI-bot toggle quietly makes a site invisible to engines while it looks perfectly normal in a browser. Always check access before anything else.
+How often should I run an AEO audit?
Baseline now, re-audit after any major site or infrastructure change, and re-check monthly. AI answers and engine behavior shift over time, so periodic re-probing keeps your visibility data current.
+Can I automate an AEO audit?
Yes. Tools like cited? run the full checklist automatically — crawler access, extractability, schema, trust, and entity signals — and combine it with live citation testing so you see both the causes and the results.