AEO Checker: Your Answer Engine Readiness Score
Ten yes, partly or no questions, a weighted score out of 100 and the pillar to fix first.
Your AEO Readiness Score
10 questions. 2 minutes. Find out how ready your website is to be cited and surfaced by AI engines, and which pillar to fix first.
What this tool does
This free AEO checker scores how ready your website is to be cited by answer engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini. You answer ten questions about your own site, each with yes, partly or no, and the tool turns those answers into a weighted AEO readiness score out of 100 with a breakdown across six pillars. It takes about two minutes and asks for no sign-up, no URL and no email address.
I built it for marketing leads, founders and in-house SEOs who suspect their site is invisible to AI search and want a structured way to test that suspicion before paying for an audit. What you get is a score, a readiness band from AEO Unready to AEO Ready, your three weakest pillars ranked, and a short list of fixes matched to each one. Treat it as a first pass. If the score comes back low, the AI Visibility Audit is the step that checks your actual pages.
How the AEO checker works
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1Decide what you are scoring
Answer for the pages that matter commercially, not the homepage alone.
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2Answer ten questions
Yes, Partly or No, each with a hint. Keys 1, 2 and 3 answer; the left arrow goes back.
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3Read the score
A number out of 100, a band, and a bar for each of the six pillars.
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4Act on the focus list
Up to three pillars under 75 percent, weakest first, with the one change I would make for each.
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5Copy or retake
Share the score, ship the fixes, run it again.
What AEO readiness means
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring a website so that AI answer engines can find, extract and cite its content when they generate a response, rather than only ranking it as a blue link. AEO readiness is the narrower question this checker answers: does your site carry the signals those engines look for before they quote you?
Those signals are consistent across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews: a direct answer near the top of the page, schema that says what the page is and who wrote it, a named author with verifiable credentials, consistent brand naming, clean formatting, and nothing blocking AI crawlers. For the background, read my explainer on what AEO is and my full guide to answer engine optimisation.
How the score is calculated
The checker asks ten questions in six pillars. Each question carries a fixed weight: Yes earns it in full, Partly earns half, No earns nothing. The weights add up to exactly 100, so your score is the points you earned, rounded to a whole number. Each pillar bar shows the percentage of that pillar's points you earned; the focus list names up to three pillars under 75 percent, weakest first.
| Pillar | Questions | Weight per question | Maximum points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct answer format | 2 | 12 | 24 |
| Schema markup | 2 | 10 | 20 |
| E-E-A-T infrastructure | 2 | 10 | 20 |
| Entity clarity | 1 | 10 | 10 |
| Content format for AI parsing | 1 | 8 | 8 |
| Technical crawlability | 2 | 9 | 18 |
| Total | 10 | 100 |
What each pillar tests
- Direct answer format (24 points)
- Do priority pages answer the query inside the first 50 words, and do key pages carry an FAQ section? Weighted highest because it moves citation share fastest.
- Schema markup (20 points)
- Is FAQPage, Article, Service or Product JSON-LD in place, with sameAs links to LinkedIn, Wikidata or Crunchbase? The free schema markup generator writes it if not.
- E-E-A-T infrastructure (20 points)
- Named bylines with linked author pages, plus visible credentials or first-hand evidence. The E-E-A-T score checker goes deeper here.
- Entity clarity (10 points)
- Is the brand described the same way in schema, meta tags, titles and body copy?
- Content format for AI parsing (8 points)
- Clear H2 and H3 hierarchy and short paragraphs. Lowest weight because it is one mechanical fix.
- Technical crawlability (18 points)
- Does robots.txt allow GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended, and are key pages indexable? A No here nullifies every other signal.
How to read your AEO score
Every score lands in one of five fixed bands. Here is what each means and the first thing I would do in it.
AEO Unready
Almost none of the foundations exist. Start with crawlability: confirm robots.txt allows the four AI crawlers and check your top ten pages for noindex tags and broken canonicals.
Early Stage
Some foundations, but the signals engines rely on most are missing. Add a named byline with an author page to every article and service page, then Article or Service JSON-LD to your ten most important URLs.
Developing
The usual gap is answers buried under introductions. Rewrite the first 50 words of your top ten pages to answer the query outright, then add an FAQ section to each. This is where sites go from occasionally cited to regularly cited.
Strong Foundation
Structurally ready. Gains come from depth: sameAs on Organization and Person schema, consistent naming everywhere, FAQPage schema where FAQs exist. Start measuring actual citations; my guide to AI visibility explains how.
AEO Ready
Every pillar is strong. Monitor citation share monthly, expand topical authority around the entities you own, and re-run the checker after any template change. Readiness erodes quietly when nobody watches the schema.
What this tool does not do
- It is a self-assessment. It scores your answers, not your site. When in doubt, answer Partly.
- It does not crawl anything. It never fetches pages, reads robots.txt or parses schema.
- It does not query a live answer engine. It cannot say whether you are cited today; for that, see my review of the best AI visibility tools.
- It does not validate schema. Test your JSON-LD in Google's Rich Results Test.
- It does not compare you with competitors. A 70 says nothing about the site being cited instead of you.
AEO checker FAQ
What does an AEO checker test?
Whether a site has the signals answer engines use when choosing sources: direct answers, schema, named authors, consistent naming, clean formatting and crawler access. This one covers those six areas in ten questions and returns a weighted score out of 100.
Is the AEO checker free, and do I need to enter my URL?
Yes and no. It never asks for a URL, an email address or a sign-up; it scores the answers you give about your own site.
What is a good AEO score?
66 upwards means structurally ready. Most business sites I score for the first time land between 30 and 55, usually weak on schema and author infrastructure.
Should I score my whole site or a single page?
Score the five to fifteen pages you most want cited, and answer Yes only if the signal is in place across all of them. For a page-level read on lost traffic, use the content decay detector.
Does a high AEO score guarantee citations in ChatGPT or AI Overviews?
No. Readiness is necessary, not sufficient. Engines also weigh topical authority and the strength of competing sources. A high score removes the structural reasons you are not cited, not the competitive ones.
Want the score checked against your actual pages?
The AI Visibility Audit reviews your real URLs, schema, author signals and content format against the criteria answer engines use, and returns a prioritised fix list. Or get in touch and tell me your score.
This checker is one of the free SEO tools I publish on GWContent.
