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.
Why does the order of an AEO audit matter?
Because the checks are dependencies, not a menu. If AI crawlers can't reach your pages, no amount of schema or content work will get you cited — the engine never sees it. So audit top-down: access, then extractability, then structure and trust. Fixing a lower layer before an upper one blocks it is wasted effort.
This checklist follows that order. Run it as a sequence, and stop to fix a blocker before moving on. The related deep-dive on why you're not cited uses the same layered logic.
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.
WebCited automates this entire checklist — 18 audit checks plus live probing — and returns a prioritized fix list for free.
How do I turn the audit into an action plan?
An audit is only useful if it produces a ranked to-do list. Sort findings by leverage: a crawler block is a one-line robots.txt fix that unlocks everything, so it goes first even though it sounds small. Extractability rewrites come next, then schema, then the slow-burn trust work.
Fix in that order, then re-probe the exact queries you care about to confirm the change moved you from absent to mentioned or cited. Without the re-probe you're guessing — the whole point of an AEO audit is to measure the before and after, not just tick boxes.
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 WebCited 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.
+How long does an AEO audit take?
A manual pass through the five areas takes a few hours for a small site — longer if you're testing crawler access by hand for each user-agent. An automated scanner runs the whole checklist plus live probing in a minute or two, which is why most people baseline with a tool and reserve manual review for the fixes.
