What an AEO Audit Is
An AEO audit measures whether AI answer engines can find, understand, trust and quote your brand. It is not an SEO audit with AI words added. It tests the specific things that decide whether ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot cite you, cite a competitor, or describe you incorrectly.
Most brands discover two things in the first week. First, that AI engines are already being asked about their category dozens of times a day. Second, that the engines are answering with somebody else’s content.
What We Check
1. Citation baseline
Where your brand is cited, mentioned, misrepresented or entirely invisible across five AI engines, measured against competitors you name. This is the number everything else is judged against.
2. Entity clarity
Whether your Organization schema, on-site copy and off-site descriptions agree on who you are, what you sell and who you serve. AI systems answer from entities. If your entity is ambiguous, you do not get quoted.
3. Answer readiness
Whether a model can lift a clean, self-contained answer from your pages. Direct response first, supporting detail after, claims attached to evidence.
4. Structured data
Organization, Service, FAQPage and Article coverage, and whether what is there is correct rather than merely present.
5. AI crawler access
Whether GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended can actually reach your content, and whether your robots.txt and llms.txt help or quietly exclude you.
6. Technical foundations
Crawl depth, indexation, canonicals and speed. AEO sits on top of SEO. If the foundations are broken, no amount of answer formatting gets you cited.
7. Competitor citation gap
Which sources the engines quote instead of you, and what those sources do that you do not.
What You Get
- A prioritised fix list, ordered by effort against likely citation impact, not a 90-page PDF nobody reads.
- Per-URL specifications: titles, headings, schema and content changes written so a developer or editor can implement them directly.
- Your citation baseline, so movement is measurable rather than asserted.
- Ready-to-implement schema and llms.txt, written for your business rather than generated from a template.
If you would rather we implemented it, the audit rolls into our AEO agency engagement and the audit fee comes off the first month.
The AEO Audit is $495
Agencies charge $1,500 to $5,000 for an AI visibility audit. We are pricing ours below the market on purpose, because most brands have never seen what AI engines actually say about them.
- Every check listed above, run by hand on your site, not a template
- A prioritised fix list, highest impact first
- Per URL specs your team or developer can action immediately
- Your baseline citation score across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini
- A 30 minute walkthrough call when it lands
- Delivered in 5 working days
Who This Is For
The audit is worth running if any of these are true:
- Your category is one people ask AI tools about, and you do not know what the answer says about you.
- Your organic traffic is flat or falling while your rankings have not moved, which often means answers are absorbing the clicks.
- You are being described inaccurately by an AI engine and want it corrected.
- You are about to invest in content and want it built to be quotable rather than merely ranked.
It is not worth running if your site is not yet indexed or has no meaningful content. Start with SEO fundamentals first, and we will tell you if that is the case rather than sell you an audit.
The Track Record Behind It
Enterprise ecommerce platform, 71,000 URLs. Crawl depth, canonicals and internal linking rebuilt. Over 50,700 internal no-response URLs resolved and roughly 23,000 canonical tag issues corrected across more than 100,000 URLs. Six-month result: organic clicks up 24% to 4.00 million, impressions up 29% to 68.99 million, and $599,560 in organic revenue. Verified in Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
DTC dental ecommerce brand. Technical SEO, on-page, content and link building over ten months. Impressions up 441.6%, clicks up 153.5%, organic revenue up 18.8%, and commercial keywords ranking in the top ten up from 37 to 102. The brand added 11,574 new customers and crossed $1 million in annual sales.
AEO Audit FAQs
What is an AEO audit?
An AEO audit is an assessment of whether AI answer engines can find, understand, trust and quote your brand. It measures your current citation rate across engines such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, identifies why you are or are not being cited, and produces a prioritised list of fixes.
How is an AEO audit different from an SEO audit?
An SEO audit asks whether search engines can crawl, index and rank your pages. An AEO audit asks whether AI systems can retrieve, understand and quote your content in a generated answer. The two overlap on technical foundations, but AEO adds entity clarity, answer-ready content structure, AI crawler access and citation measurement, none of which a standard SEO audit covers.
Do I still need an AEO audit if my SEO is already strong?
Usually yes. Strong rankings do not guarantee citations. AI engines select sources based on entity clarity, answer structure and corroboration across the web, not ranking position alone. Brands ranking in the top three are routinely absent from the AI answer for the same query.
Which AI engines do you check?
ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot as standard. Additional engines can be added on request.
How long does an AEO audit take?
A standard AEO audit takes two to three weeks from receiving access, depending on site size and how many competitors you want benchmarked.
What happens after the audit?
You receive the prioritised fix list and per-URL specifications, and your team can implement them. If you would prefer Kadima to implement, the audit rolls into an ongoing AEO engagement and the audit fee is credited against the first month.
Book an AEO audit
Tell us your category and the competitors you want benchmarked against, and we will tell you whether an audit is worth running before you pay for one.
