AEO audit: see what AI search says about you, and why

What is an AEO audit for AI search?

It is a structured check of whether answer engines can reach your site, what they currently say about your brand, and who they cite instead of you. If you searched this term and found customs pages, those are about the Authorized Economic Operator trade program, which is unrelated.

An AI visibility audit differs from a classic SEO audit in what it records. Rankings and crawl errors still matter, but the core evidence is the answers themselves: which brands are named, which URLs are linked, and how your company is described. That is the material your next decisions should rest on.

What does the AEO audit check?

It checks access, answers, entities and pages, in that order. Each area produces findings tied to evidence you can verify yourself.

• Crawler access: robots.txt rules for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Bingbot and Googlebot.
• Firewall and CDN: Cloudflare AI crawler blocking, managed robots.txt and content signals.
• Rendering: whether key content is in server-rendered HTML or hidden behind JavaScript.
• Indexing: Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools coverage for the pages that should be cited.
• Prompt results: answers and citations for each buyer question across six engines.
• Entity facts: Organization schema, sameAs links, Wikidata, G2, Capterra, Yelp and Google Business Profile.
• Page structure: answer-first paragraphs, question headings, sources, FAQ blocks and last-updated dates.

How do we test buyer prompts across answer engines?

We write a prompt set from your real buyer questions, run each one in every engine, and log the answer, the brands named and the URLs cited. The log becomes the baseline for every later comparison.

Prompts come from sales calls, support tickets, Search Console queries and competitor comparison terms, so they reflect how buyers actually ask. We run them in clean sessions, note the date, and repeat important ones because answers shift. Semrush found only 25% of cited sources overlap between ChatGPT's different reasoning modes, which shows why a single run proves very little.

Patterns matter more than any one answer. If the same review site, Reddit thread or competitor comparison page appears again and again, that source is shaping how engines see your category, and the fix plan will say how to earn a place in it.

Is something blocking AI crawlers from your site?

Often, yes, and the site owner rarely knows. Cloudflare changed its default on 1 July 2025 to block AI crawlers unless they pay, and in June 2026 said AI training crawlers would be blocked by default on all new domains.

Blocking training crawlers such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot is a fair choice. The problem comes when a broad rule also catches OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Claude-SearchBot, which decide whether you can appear in search answers at all. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers. We read your robots.txt, your Cloudflare bot settings and a sample of server logs to confirm which bots actually reach your pages.

How does an AI search audit check what engines say about your brand?

We compare what the engines say against what is true, then trace any errors back to their likely source. Outdated pricing, a retired product or the wrong headquarters usually comes from a stale profile somewhere on the web.

An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found 26% had zero mentions in AI Overviews. Being absent is common, and so is being described wrongly. We list every factual error we see, the third-party pages that carry it, and the order in which to correct them, starting with your own About page, Organization schema and the profiles engines cite most.

What do you get at the end of an AI visibility audit?

You get a written report, the raw prompt log and a ranked fix plan, walked through on a call. Nothing depends on hiring us afterwards.

The fix plan scores each item on likely value and effort, names an owner type (developer, writer, marketing ops) and links to the evidence. Typical quick wins include a robots.txt correction, a missing answer paragraph on a high-intent page, or an outdated G2 description. Larger items, such as comparison pages or original data, are scoped so you can decide whether to build them in-house, with our AEO consulting, or through our ongoing AI search optimization program.