AEO Audit Checklist
Answer Engine Optimization AEO is about making your content easy for AI systems to quote, summarise, and trust. In an environment where answers matter more than links, AEO ensures your pages deliver clear statements, defined entities, and evidence that AI can safely reuse. Our proprietary AEO audit checklist focuses on clarity, structure, consistency, and credibility so answer engines can confidently surface your content in AI overviews, assistants, and voice results.
Answer Engine Foundations
A strong AEO foundation starts with knowing where and how AI systems can surface you. This part of the audit maps the answer surfaces that matter, then checks whether your site sends clean, consistent signals those systems can reliably reuse.
- List key answer surfaces you care about AI overviews, assistants, voice, snippets
- Confirm priority queries where answers, not links, dominate results
- Check whether your domain appears in current AI-style summaries
- Review how competitors are cited or quoted in those same answers
- Identify the content types most often reused guides, FAQs, comparison pages
Questions, Prompts & FAQ Structure
Answer engines need clearly framed questions and direct responses. This section checks whether your content matches how real people ask, and whether your pages contain scannable, reusable answers that can be lifted with minimal editing or interpretation risk.
- Capture real questions from search data, PPC queries, and call logs
- Ensure FAQs use natural language questions, not keyword fragments
- Provide one clear, on-page answer before secondary details
- Use bullets and short paragraphs for reusable responses
- Group related questions logically on core topic pages
- Avoid mixing multiple questions into a single tangled answer
Entity & Schema Clarity
AEO depends on unambiguous entities – who you are, what you offer, where you operate, and for whom. This part of the audit ensures structured data and copy line up so machines do not have to guess what your key entities actually mean.
- Confirm consistent naming for brand, products, services, and locations
- Use Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, and Article schema where relevant
- Align schema values with visible on-page copy and contact details
- Resolve conflicting addresses, phone numbers, and service areas
- Clarify audience, use cases, and eligibility in plain language
- Check that critical facts are not only in images or PDFs
Evidence, E-E-A-T & Source Signals
Answer engines increasingly prefer content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This section verifies whether your pages surface the proof points, authorship, and supporting evidence that make your answers safer to cite and summarise at scale.
- Highlight real-world experience, case examples, and practical detail
- Show expert credentials or organizational authority where appropriate
- Use clear, sourced statements for statistics and claims
- Provide dates or versioning on time-sensitive content
- Avoid sensational claims that are hard to verify
- Make it easy to see who stands behind each key page
Consistency & Conflict Checks
AI systems struggle when your own content disagrees with itself. This part of the AEO audit looks for conflicting prices, policies, definitions, or numbers that could cause answer engines to either mistrust you or skip you entirely as a safe source.
- Compare core facts across pages pricing, hours, locations, guarantees
- Check older posts for outdated or reversed recommendations
- Align terminology for products, plans, and service tiers
- Resolve conflicting metrics in case studies and reports
- Retire or update legacy content that contradicts current positioning
- Document canonical definitions for key terms and metrics
Page Layout & Answer UX
The way answers are laid out affects how easily they can be extracted. This section looks at whether your design makes the primary answer, supporting detail, and proof points obvious to both humans and machines without forcing them to dig or guess.
- Place the clearest answer high on the page, near the question
- Use subheadings that mirror real queries where appropriate
- Break processes into numbered, step-by-step lists
- Use tables for comparisons that AI can parse cleanly
- Avoid burying crucial details deep in long, unstructured paragraphs
- Check mobile layouts for truncated or hidden answers
Analytics & Behaviour Signals
Behaviour does not just matter for CRO – it also hints at answer quality. This part of the audit uses analytics to see whether visitors actually stay, scroll, and complete tasks after landing on pages that should be resolving their primary questions.
- Track entry pages tied to high-intent informational queries
- Review scroll depth and time on page for core answer sections
- Monitor pogo-sticking back to search on key topics
- Measure micro-conversions tied to answer consumption downloads, views
- Segment behaviour by device to catch mobile-specific friction
- Use on-page polls or feedback for “Was this answer helpful?”
Governance, Risk & Change Management
AEO is not a one-time switch – it depends on keeping facts, language, and schema aligned as your business changes. This final section ensures you have lightweight processes that protect answer quality every time someone edits content or launches a new offer.
- Define owners for critical fact sets pricing, policies, locations
- Include AEO checks in content and SEO review workflows
- Maintain a simple source-of-truth document for canonical facts
- Schedule periodic reviews of top answer pages and FAQs
- Monitor how you are cited in AI overviews and assistants
- Log major changes that could affect AI interpretations