AEO Checker
Score any page for answer engine optimisation and see how ready it is to be read and cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
What is AEO?
Answer engine optimisation (AEO), sometimes called generative engine optimisation, is the practice of structuring a page so that AI answer engines can read it, understand what it is about, and cite it in their answers. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews a question, those engines pull from pages they can parse cleanly and trust. AEO is how you make sure your page is one of them.
This checker fetches the page, then grades it from 0 to 100 across four dimensions worth 25 points each. It detects the page type first - a homepage, product page, article, FAQ, docs page, pricing page, and more - and grades each page only on the signals that type should actually have. A product page is never marked down for missing an author byline, and a category page is not expected to carry FAQ markup, so the score is fair and comparable across very different pages.
What the four dimensions mean
Structured data
JSON-LD structured data is the clearest signal to an AI engine about what a page is and what questions it answers. The checker looks for JSON-LD (or microdata) and rewards the high-value schema types that fit the page: FAQPage and QAPage for question content, Product and Offer for shopping pages, Article and BlogPosting for editorial, and Organization and WebSite for brand identity. Missing or thin structured data is the most common reason a page scores poorly.
Content structure
AI engines prefer well-structured, answer-shaped content. This dimension checks for a single clear H1, enough H2 subheadings to segment topics, question-framed headings (the format most often quoted by AI), definition or glossary blocks, and a table of contents. Question-and-answer patterns score highest because they map directly onto how people query an assistant.
Entity clarity
Clear entity signals help an engine identify and cite the page accurately. The checker grades your title, meta description, canonical URL, and Open Graph tags, and rewards a title and H1 that share key terms so the page's identity is unambiguous. A missing canonical or meta description means an engine may cite a duplicate version or fall back to guessing your summary.
Citation signals
AI engines lean towards content that carries trust signals. For editorial pages that means clear authorship, publication and modified dates, external references to credible sources, and enough depth to be worth quoting. For commercial pages it shifts to reviews and ratings, which are a top signal AI weighs at the buy decision. The checker only holds a page to the signals its type genuinely needs.
How to improve your AEO score
- Add JSON-LD structured data that matches the page: FAQPage for a FAQ, Product plus Offer for a product, Article for a post, Organization plus WebSite on your homepage.
- Use one clear H1 and descriptive H2 subheadings, and frame key headings as the questions your audience actually asks.
- Set a descriptive title, a meta description of roughly 50 to 160 characters, and a self-referential canonical URL on every page.
- Add Open Graph title and description so your entity reads consistently wherever the page is shared or parsed.
- On editorial pages, show a named author and a visible publication or updated date, and cite credible external sources.
- On product and pricing pages, add Review or AggregateRating schema and Offer schema with price, currency, and availability.
This tool checks a page once, on demand. To watch a page and catch every change that moves its AEO score - yours or a competitor's - see how AI visibility monitoring works in SiteGauge, where AEO scoring runs on every monitored page automatically.
Frequently asked questions
AEO is answer engine optimisation: structuring a page so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews can read it, understand it, and cite it in their answers. SEO optimises for ranking in a list of blue links; AEO optimises for being the source an AI quotes. They overlap heavily (clean titles, structured data, and clear headings help both) but AEO puts extra weight on JSON-LD schema, question-and-answer structure, and clear entity and trust signals. This checker scores a page on exactly those factors.
The checker fetches the page and grades it from 0 to 100 across four dimensions worth 25 points each: structured data, content structure, entity clarity, and citation signals. It first detects the page type (homepage, product, article, FAQ, docs, pricing, and more) and grades each page only on the signals that type should have, renormalising each dimension so a page is never docked for a signal it was never meant to carry. The total maps to a letter grade from A+ down to F.
A dimension shows N/A when none of its checks apply to the detected page type. For example, a category or listing page has no meaningful citation signals (no author, no publication date, no long-form depth), so that dimension is excluded from the total rather than scored zero. This is deliberate: grading a page against signals it should never have would make the score misleading. The dimensions that do apply are renormalised so they still add up to a fair 0 to 100.
No. The score measures how well a single page is structured for AI answer engines, which is a strong and controllable factor, but citation also depends on your site's overall authority, the query, freshness, and each engine's own model. Treat the score as a page-readiness checklist: fixing the flagged issues removes the technical reasons an engine might skip or misread your page, which is the part you can directly control.
This tool checks a page once, on demand. To watch the score continuously, add the page to SiteGauge: it re-scores on a schedule, keeps the full AEO history, checks which AI crawlers your robots.txt allows or blocks, and alerts you when a change moves the score. You can point it at competitor pages too and watch their AEO scores and structured-data changes alongside your own. AEO scoring is included on every plan, and the free plan monitors up to 5 URLs.