Instant AEO Audit

The Instant AEO Audit is AEO HQ's automated audit of a website and up to three competitors, for $499. Software, not a person, crawls your key pages, checks AI crawler access, structured data, and llms.txt, pulls authority and keyword data from Ahrefs, and asks one AI model five questions that a buyer might ask. It returns a readiness score, a prioritized to-do list with steps, and competitor moves. It does not measure how often live AI assistants mention you.

An audit for answer engine optimization (AEO) checks how well a site's pages and facts can be found, used, and cited by AI assistants, and what assistants say about the company. There is no standard definition of an AEO audit, so this page sets out what this one does and does not do, as it works on September 28, 2026. The price and the list of what it includes come from AEO HQ's pricing page. AI models carry out two of the audit's six steps, and the methodology page documents the method, including which models and services it uses. For an audit done by people, see the $2,500 AEO Audit on the answer engine optimization services page.

What the audit checks

The audit runs six steps in order. If a step fails, the audit records the failure and continues with the data it has, and the report says which data was missing.

1. Your key pages. It fetches your home page and up to five other key pages, chosen by their paths from a map of up to 200 of your site's URLs: pages such as /pricing, /product, /features, /solutions, /about, /faq, /customers, case studies, /blog, /docs, and comparison pages. From the home page's HTML, it records the schema.org types in the page's JSON-LD structured data, the number of H1 headings, the canonical URL, the meta robots tag, whether a social preview image is set, and the page language.
2. Crawler access and root files. It requests /robots.txt, /llms.txt, and /sitemap.xml. It records whether robots.txt exists, which AI crawlers on a fixed list it blocks from the whole site, whether it lists a sitemap, whether sitemap.xml exists, and whether llms.txt exists as a text file. robots.txt is the file that tells crawlers which parts of a site they may visit. llms.txt is a proposed file that gives language models a short summary of a site and links to its key pages.
3. Authority and keyword data. From Ahrefs, it pulls your Domain Rating, which Ahrefs describes as showing "the strength of a website's backlink profile compared to the others in our database on a 100-point scale" (opens in a new tab) (vendor documentation). It also pulls your estimated organic keywords and organic traffic, the 25 U.S. organic keywords that bring you the most estimated traffic, and up to eight U.S. organic competitors.
4. Competitors. It compares up to three competitor domains that you name. If you name none, it takes the three sites that overlap most with yours in U.S. organic search, by Ahrefs' count of shared keywords. For each competitor, it pulls Domain Rating and organic estimates and runs the same home-page checks as in step 1.
5. AI answers. One AI model, called through its API, reads the opening text of up to three of your crawled pages. It names your company and its category, and writes five questions a buyer might ask an AI assistant before choosing a vendor, without naming you. The same model then answers each question once, without web search, and is asked to name specific vendors or products and say why. An answer counts as a mention if it contains your company's name or the first part of your domain, such as "acme" for acme.com. Competitors are matched by the first part of their domains. If no page could be crawled, this step is skipped.
6. The report. A second AI model writes the report from everything the audit collected. It is instructed to justify each task with that evidence, not to invent metrics, pages, or rankings, and to say when a data source is missing.

What you receive

The report appears in your client portal. It contains:

• A readiness score from 0 to 100, with four sub-scores (technical, content, authority, and AI visibility) and a short summary of where the site stands. The report model assigns these numbers, and the code sets no formula or weights for them. Read them as the model's summary judgment of the evidence, not as a measurement. AEO HQ has not tested how much they vary when the same site is audited twice.
• A prioritized to-do list. The report model is asked for 12 to 20 tasks, most important first. Each task shows its category (technical, content, authority, or AI visibility), its priority (do now, next, or later), an effort estimate (S for under a day, M for under a week, L for longer), why it matters, two to five steps, and the finding that justifies it. You can filter the list by priority.
• Competitor moves. For each competitor: how it presents itself, where it beats you, and one move to make in response.
• A note on missing data, if any step could not collect its data.

The report does not list the five buyer questions or the model's answers. They inform the AI visibility sub-score, the summary, and the tasks.

Who it suits, and who it does not

This section is our recommendation.

The audit suits:

1. A first technical check at a fixed price, before you decide whether to buy more: crawler access, root files, home-page markup, and key pages.
2. A comparison with up to three competitors on Ahrefs authority data and home-page setup.
3. A first look at what one AI model associates with your category from its training data.
4. Teams that will act on a to-do list themselves. To check a site by hand instead, the free AEO checklist lists each check and how to verify it.

It does not suit:

1. Measuring AI visibility. How often ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google's AI features mention you has to be measured over repeated runs on each assistant, because when the same prompt was repeated, ChatGPT and Google's AI returned the same list of brands less than once in 100 runs (opens in a new tab) (vendor study; 2,961 runs). How to measure AI visibility sets out a method.
2. Judging a new or small company by the AI result alone. The model answers from its training data. Among 112 startups from the 2025 Product Hunt leaderboard, a model without web access named 5.4% of them at least once in discovery-style questions, while a search-based model named 27.7% (opens in a new tab) (preprint; a master's thesis). A "not mentioned" result for a young company is expected and says little.
3. Companies whose name is a common word. The text matching can count unrelated uses of the word as mentions.
4. Sites that sell mainly outside the United States. The keyword list and the suggested competitors come from Ahrefs' U.S. data.
5. Buyers who want a person's judgment, a call, a plan, or implementation. Those are in the AEO Audit, the AEO Blueprint, and Blueprint + Implementation.

How it runs, step by step

1. Buy. Buy the Instant AEO Audit opens the pricing page with the audit in your order. Enter a work email and pay $499, once, at checkout. Payment is handled by Stripe.
2. Enter the domain to audit and, if you like, up to three competitor domains. Leave the competitors blank and the audit picks the sites that overlap most with yours in search.
3. Let the audit run. It runs its six steps automatically, and the portal shows each step as it runs. If the run fails, you can run it again.
4. Read the report in your client portal.
5. Decide what to do next. Fix the items yourself, or buy work done by people: the AEO Audit, the AEO Blueprint, or Blueprint + Implementation. If you buy the AEO Audit within 30 days with the same email, the $499 is credited at checkout.

One purchase covers one audit of one domain. The audit needs no access to your analytics or Search Console: it uses your public pages and files, and Ahrefs data.

Limits

1. Five questions, one run each. Answers vary between runs, so five answers are a small sample. If none of them names you, the 95% range for your true mention rate still runs from 0% to 43% (AEO HQ's calculation).
2. One model, through its API. The audit does not test the ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, or Google interfaces that buyers use. In one audit of product recommendations, the API and the consumer app of the same assistant shared only 12.0% (ChatGPT) and 14.8% (Gemini) of cited domains (opens in a new tab) (preprint).
3. No web search. The answers show what one model recalls from training, not what an assistant finds when it searches.
4. Questions written by the model from your own pages, not from research into what your buyers ask.
5. Text matching without review. A name written another way can be missed, and no person checks the matches.
6. A narrow crawler check. The audit flags a crawler only when robots.txt blocks it from the whole site. It does not detect partial blocks, blocks set in a firewall or content delivery network, or crawlers outside its list, which the methodology page names. It can also report a block that a crawler would not obey, because it does not apply the standard's rule that a crawler follows the group of rules that names it, and uses the "*" group only when no group matches (opens in a new tab) (Internet standard). Google lists making sure that crawling is allowed "in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure" (opens in a new tab) among the basics for its AI features (official documentation).
7. Markup on the home page only. The audit lists the schema.org types in the home page's JSON-LD. It does not validate the markup or check other pages.
8. Files found, contents unchecked. The llms.txt and sitemap checks confirm that the files respond, not what they contain.
9. Estimates. Domain Rating, keyword, and traffic figures are Ahrefs estimates. Ahrefs says that search volume "in any SEO tool, including Ahrefs, is always an estimation" (opens in a new tab) (vendor documentation).
10. One run, no follow-up. One purchase runs one audit. It does not track changes over time.

How to read the schema and llms.txt checks

Neither schema markup nor an llms.txt file is a proven way to be cited in AI answers. In a matched study of 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD markup, AI Overview citations fell 4.6%, and the changes for AI Mode and ChatGPT were statistically indistinguishable from zero (opens in a new tab) (vendor study). Google says that structured data isn't required for generative AI search (opens in a new tab) and asks site owners to make sure it matches the visible text on the page (opens in a new tab) (official documentation). In one vendor's server logs, 97% of llms.txt files received no requests in May 2026 (opens in a new tab). If the to-do list includes a task to add either, we recommend treating it as housekeeping, not as a way to be cited.

Instant AEO Audit and AEO Audit compared

The AEO Blueprint ($4,995) adds a plan and a strategy workshop to the AEO Audit, and Blueprint + Implementation ($8,995) adds technical implementation. The AEO services page linked above compares all four packages.

FAQ

What is an AEO audit?

A check of how well a site's pages and facts can be found, used, and cited by AI assistants, and of what assistants say about the company. There is no standard definition, and sellers use the name for anything from automated reports to reviews done by people over days or weeks; what AEO costs, AEO HQ's sourced pricing index, lists published prices for both kinds. AEO HQ sells two: this automated audit and the $2,500 AEO Audit.

Does the Instant AEO Audit check ChatGPT?

Not directly. It does not use ChatGPT or any other assistant's app. It asks one AI model, through its API and without web search, five buyer questions, once each. It does check whether your robots.txt blocks OpenAI's crawlers from the whole site.

What do I need to provide?

The domain to audit and, if you like, up to three competitor domains. The audit needs no access to your analytics or Search Console.

Does the $499 count toward the AEO Audit or the Blueprint?

Yes, toward the AEO Audit: buy it within 30 days with the same email and the $499 is credited at checkout. The $2,500 AEO Audit's full price is in turn credited toward the AEO Blueprint when you upgrade within 30 days.

Can I audit more than one domain?

One purchase covers one audit of one domain. To audit another domain, buy another Instant AEO Audit.

Is a person involved?

No. The audit is automated, and the report is not reviewed by a person before you see it.

How is the readiness score calculated?

An AI model assigns it from the evidence the audit collected, and the code sets no formula or weights. Read it as a summary judgment, and base decisions on the tasks and the finding behind each one.

Which AI models does it use?

The methodology page names the models and the web-scraping service that the audit uses.

How to buy

Buy the Instant AEO Audit, $499

The link opens the pricing page with the audit in your order. Enter a work email and continue to checkout; payment is handled by Stripe. For an audit done by people, with a report and a readout call, buy the AEO Audit, $2,500. For questions, email paul@aeohq.ai.

Change log

• September 28, 2026: First published. Describes the audit as it works on September 28, 2026, with package facts checked against the pricing page on the same date.