The AEO audit checklist
A serious AEO audit checks whether AI answer engines can find your business, understand it, and trust it enough to cite it. It reviews nine areas - from whether the AI crawlers can reach you, through a page-by-page AEO scorecard and the citation landscape, to the schema roadmap, the content plan and a prioritised sprint - delivered as a 12-section report.
What a real AEO audit reviews
These are the nine areas an AEO audit works through. The checklist is genuinely useful on its own: run it against your own site and you will find most of the gaps. What the paid audit adds is depth, every page scored, and the finished, build-ready assets, so you fix the gaps instead of just seeing them.
- 01
AI visibility today
Whether the AI answer-engine crawlers can actually reach and read your site - OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and the rest - or whether robots.txt or client-side rendering is shutting them out.
WhyIf the bots cannot read you, nothing else matters: you cannot be cited in answers you were never crawled for. This is the first thing to fix.
- 02
Crawl & accessibility
Coverage across the whole site: sitemap, robots.txt, and any noindex or blocked pages that stop parts of the site being seen at all.
WhyA gap in what is crawlable is a gap in what can be cited. You cannot win an answer built from a page the engine never reached.
- 03
AEO scorecard
Every page scored on the four criteria that decide citability - Direct answer, Specificity, Schema, Conversational - rolled into an overall Group of Dots AEO Score and band.
WhyA measured baseline, page by page, is what every recommendation is prioritised against. You manage what you measure.
- 04
Homepage deep dive
A close read of the page engines lean on hardest, criterion by criterion, ending with the two or three highest-impact changes.
WhyThe homepage is where an engine decides who you are. If it misreads you there, it misreads you everywhere.
- 05
Page-level findings
Your strongest and weakest pages, what the strong ones get right and the weak ones miss, with the specific finding behind each score.
WhyThe pattern across pages shows where citation is being won and lost, and which pages to fix first.
- 06
Citation landscape
An honest read of where you and named competitors stand in AI answers today, and where the opening is. (Continuous per-engine citation tracking is the ongoing retainer, not the one-off audit.)
WhyCitation is relative: being invisible while a rival is named is the loss that actually costs deals.
- 07
Schema roadmap
Schema coverage and entity clarity, plus the exact per-page JSON-LD to add, ready to paste: Organization, Service, FAQPage, the sameAs links that join your profiles into one entity, and more.
WhySchema makes a page legible to a machine, and a clean entity model makes the engine sure it is dealing with one business, not several.
- 08
Content & messaging
Per-page editorial direction on the writing that gets quoted: leading with the answer, replacing vague claims with specifics, and a conversational, question-led structure. A scored copy action plan for each page.
WhyStructure and substance together make a page quotable. One without the other does not.
- 09
Recommended sprint & roadmap
A prioritised, phased plan - highest-impact unblockers first, then content, then the long tail - ordered by what moves citation fastest for the least effort.
WhyYou get the commercial priorities and a sequence to execute, not a flat list of everything that could be tweaked.
What you actually receive
The findings are delivered as a fixed 12-section report: the nine review areas above, wrapped with an executive summary up front, a short 'how we assessed your site' methodology note, and a 'beyond the sprint' next-steps section.
With it come the working assets, not a dashboard to figure out yourself: an AEO score, a per-page JSON-LD schema bundle (the exact schema to add, page by page), per-page content plans (a scored copy action plan for each page), a ready-to-host llms.txt, a prioritised roadmap, and the full report as a PDF. Assets your team (or ours, or a third party) can ship.
The AEO audit is from USD 2,500, scaled to site size. Large or multi-language sites are quoted individually. If you want a first read before committing, the free AEO snapshot on the audit page scores your homepage instantly.
Group of Dots is an Answer Engine Optimisation studio. We get established businesses found, and chosen, when buyers ask AI for a shortlist.
Last updated: 2 July 2026
Run the checklist for real.
The paid audit works through the full checklist, site-wide, and hands back the assets: the score, the schema bundle, the content plans, the llms.txt, the roadmap, and the full report.