The AEO Checker Blog
Practical Answer Engine Optimization: how AI engines decide which sites to cite, how to audit a site for it, and what to fix. Written for the consultants who get asked "are we in ChatGPT?" — and for the owners asking it.
Orphan Pages, 'Click Here' Links, and Click Depth: What's Actually Sourced About AI Crawlers and Your Internal Links
2026-10-09
Search results say AI crawlers skip pages buried four clicks deep. None of those claims trace to data. Google's documentation backs the same fixes, and you can check all of it in ten minutes.
Your Site Looks Fine to You. Most AI Crawlers Get the View-Source Version.
2026-10-05
Most AI crawlers and live-fetch assistants read the raw HTML your server sends and never run JavaScript. If your phone number, hours, or FAQ answers are injected by script, they may not exist for AI. Here is the evidence, and a two-minute check.
Question Headings Are Cheap to Fix. Here's What the Evidence Says They Do, and What Google Says They Don't Need.
2026-10-02
Google says you don't need to chunk content for AI search. Vendors sell word-count formulas. Here's what's supported, what isn't, and a 10-minute check for your top service page.
One Point in Your Audit, and a Cheap Test: Does Your Site Show AI a Date?
2026-09-30
Two vendor studies suggest AI engines lean toward newer content. Neither proves a date causes a citation. Here is what they show, and how to check whether your site shows machines a date at all.
Google Killed FAQ Rich Results in May 2026. Your FAQ Schema Still Has a Job, Just Not the One Everyone's Telling You About.
2026-09-28
Google deprecated FAQ rich results and deleted the documentation page that explained them. Here's what the evidence actually supports FAQ schema doing now, and why the '3.2x more citations' stat making the rounds has no traceable primary source.
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot: The Five Names in Your robots.txt Are Not One Thing
2026-09-21
OpenAI runs three separate crawlers. So does Anthropic. Bingbot deliberately doesn't split at all, and one of the five has been accused of ignoring robots.txt entirely. Here's what each name actually does, and what to check on your own site.
ChatGPT and Perplexity Almost Never Cite the Same Source. Here's What That Means If You're Not Wikipedia.
2026-09-14
A small agency study found three AI assistants citing 104 different sources across 30 identical answers. A 22.7-million-citation study confirms the pattern at scale, and it's not stable over time either.
Is AEO a Scam? How to Tell a Real Audit From a Pitch Deck
2026-09-10
AEO and GEO have no accreditation body and no shared standard, which is exactly the condition vague, fear-based pitches thrive in. Here's a concrete checklist for telling a real audit from a guess dressed up in AI buzzwords.
Ranking #1 on Google Used to Get You Cited by AI. Three Studies Now Say That's a Coin Flip, and the Odds Are Getting Worse.
2026-09-09
Three independently-run 2025-2026 studies, and the query fan-out mechanism behind them, explain why 'I already rank well' stopped being a safe assumption about AI citations, and what's actually getting less safe every quarter.
Pasting Isn't Coding: Where the Two Schema Blocks Actually Go on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy
2026-09-07
Your report handed you two ready-to-use schema blocks. Here's exactly where each one goes on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy, no developer required.
You Fixed Your Yelp Listing. You Never Checked the One Listing You Actually Control.
2026-09-06
SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index says AI assistants drop businesses with inconsistent or incomplete data anywhere in the ecosystem, including your own website. Here's the listing inside your homepage nobody ever audited, and what our check actually catches there.
llms.txt: Who Actually Reads It, and What to Put In It
2026-09-04
The honest, sourced answer on llms.txt — what the log data says about who fetches it, what Google says, and a filled-in example you can copy.
I Took My Own Medicine: 97 out of 100, and the Three Points I Missed
2026-08-23
A friend asked what my own site scores. I ran aeocheck.net through the Full Audit pipeline and published the result: 97 out of 100, and the three points I missed.
HubSpot AEO Grader vs AEO Checker: Two Tools, Two Different Questions
2026-08-09
HubSpot's free AEO Grader and AEO Checker measure different things — here's the honest, sourced comparison and when to use each.
The AEO Audit Tool Checklist: What a Real Site Audit Has to Include
2026-07-29
A buyer's checklist for evaluating AEO audit tools — the six modules, the measure-vs-fix distinction, and the three deliverables that make a report actionable.
The AEO Report You Can Actually Put in Front of a Client
2026-07-14
What's in the AEO Checker PDF, why it's structured to be rebranded and billed, and how the price compares to retainers and subscription trackers.
How to Check a Client's AI Visibility (In About 5 Minutes)
2026-07-06
A step-by-step walkthrough for using a free AEO grade check to answer a client's 'are we in ChatGPT?' question the same afternoon.