A 48-point checklist is a hypothesis.An audit should be a result.
What a checklist cannot tell you
Every item on an AEO checklist is a plausible cause. None of them is evidence. Complete all forty-eight and you have changed your inputs without ever observing the output — the answer itself, which is the thing your buyer reads.
Four things a measurement gives you that no checklist can:
- Whether you have a problem at all. Some brands are already named in most answers and are spending on the wrong thing.
- Who is being named instead. Your rivals scored on the same four metrics, ranked next to you.
- Which pages the answers came from. Typically not yours — this is the list that turns strategy into tasks.
- A baseline you can re-measure against. The prompt set is frozen and replayed verbatim, so a re-scan in 90 days is a real before/after.
Answer engines are noisy, and the audit says so
Ask the same question twice and you can get two different vendor lists. Citation sources churn hard — AirOps reported in 2025 that about half of cited pages change every month and nearly six in ten appear once and never come back. Any tool that shows you a single number from a single query is showing you an anecdote with a decimal point on it.
So every prompt is sampled three times on every engine, and the report prints the presence rate for each pass alongside the headline figure. If those three passes disagree wildly, you will see that and can treat the number as a range. Hiding variance makes for a cleaner dashboard and a worse decision.
The four numbers, defined
Presence rate — the share of sampled answers that name your brand at all. The floor: if you are not named, nothing else can help you.
Citation rate — the share that cite your own domain as a source. Being the source is what sends traffic, and it is the hardest thing for a rival to take.
Share of voice — your mentions divided by all brand mentions. It separates dominance from being a footnote in a list of nine vendors.
Average position — where you land in the order named, when you are named. Real, but weighted least: buyers read the first two.
These combine into one 0–100 score with the weights published. A composite whose formula is hidden cannot be checked, and a number you cannot check is not a measurement.
Questions people ask before buying
- What is an AEO audit?
- Answer engine optimization is the practice of getting your brand named and cited inside AI-generated answers. An AEO audit is meant to establish where you currently stand. Most published AEO audits are checklists — 30, 48, sometimes 60 factors to review on your own site. A checklist is a list of things that might be causing a problem. It cannot tell you whether you have one, how big it is, or who is beating you.
- Is AEO different from GEO?
- Not meaningfully. AEO (answer engine optimization), GEO (generative engine optimization) and “AI search optimization” are three names for the same problem: being present in a generated answer rather than a ranked list. Different vendors picked different acronyms. We measure the same thing whichever word you use, and we would rather say that plainly than invent a distinction to sell you two products.
- What does the audit actually return?
- A visibility score out of 100 with the formula published, plus the four measured components behind it: presence rate, citation rate, share of voice and average position. Then a competitor leaderboard on those same metrics, an engine-by-engine breakdown, every third-party domain the engines cited ranked by frequency, and a prioritized fix list tied to the specific prompts each item should move.
- Why sample each question three times?
- Because answer engines are not deterministic and their sources churn. AirOps reported in 2025 that roughly half of cited pages change every month and nearly six in ten appear once and never return. Against that, a single query is an anecdote. Sampling each prompt three times across four engines gives 480 answers per audit and lets us report the spread between passes, so you can see whether a number is stable or noise.
- Do I still need the on-page work?
- Usually yes — but in the order the measurement gives you, not the order a generic checklist gives you. In most audits we run, the answers are assembled mostly from third-party pages: category directories, forum threads, comparison posts. Fixing your own markup does not win those. Knowing which pages the engines lean on tells you where the work actually is.
- What does it cost?
- The scan is free: five prompts across four engines, enough to see your score and your closest competitors. The full audit is $349, one time, no subscription, delivered within 24 hours.
Related
- GEO audit
The same measurement under the generative-engine-optimization name, and the gap between free page checkers and €2,000 agency engagements.
- AI visibility audit
What visibility means as a number, and how the four metrics roll into a single score.
- The tool landscape
Three categories of tool, what each measures, and which question each one can honestly answer.
- Sample report
Every section of the paid audit, rendered from demo data and labelled as such.
Find out what the engines actually say about you.
Start with the free scan — five prompts, four engines, about a minute. If it says you are already named in most answers, do not buy the audit. That is a real outcome and we would rather you have it.