What AEO readiness is
AEO readiness is an on-site technical and content audit: can answer engines crawl, understand, extract, and cite your pages? It is not the same as Answer-Engine Visibility. Visibility asks whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity mention you today. Readiness asks whether your website gives those systems something citable when they do look — structure, schema, entity clarity, bot access, and a reason to prefer your URL over a generic alternative.
Why it matters: if robots block GPTBot, if answers are buried under client-side JavaScript, if there is no llms.txt, weak schema, or no clear entity, engines have less reason to cite your pages. A high visibility score with a low readiness score usually means you are mentioned from third-party sources. A high readiness score with low visibility means the site is extractable but the models still do not name you — pair this audit with a visibility check.
How the audit works
Enter a domain. We crawl the homepage and up to ten key pages, read robots.txt bot allowances and llms.txt, compare raw versus rendered HTML for JavaScript dependency, and score ten equal-weight factors from 0–10 into an overall readiness score out of 100. The factors cover answer structure, schema markup, content clarity, entity clarity, crawlability, freshness, authority, llms.txt, JavaScript blocking, and citability. We do not query model APIs for mentions on this page — this is a site audit, not a visibility fan-out.
On-screen results are free and public. Enter an email only if you want the checklist PDF for every crawled page. Identical domain audits reuse a 24-hour cache so reloads stay fast. Treat the score as a prioritized punch list, not a ranking certificate.
How to read the results
The overall score is the average of those ten factors, not a visibility grade. Each factor expands to a finding and a specific fix. Start with the three “do this week” priorities — those are the highest-leverage gaps on the pages we crawled. Then download the checklist if you need the same scorecard for every URL. A 70 with three crawl or schema failures is more actionable than a 90 with no next step.
After you fix the on-site gaps, run AI Visibility Score or the AI Visibility Checker to see whether engines mention you. Use AI Citation Checker to see which domains they cite instead. Use AI Brand Monitoring when you want a saved Monitor after the technical work lands.
Related tools
Explore related free tools in the suite: AI Visibility Score, AI Visibility Checker, AI Citation Checker, and AI Brand Monitoring. Each report is independent — run the tool that matches the question you need answered today.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need an account to run this audit?
No. On-screen results are free and public. Enter an email only if you want to download the checklist PDF.
Is this the same as Answer-Engine Visibility?
No. Readiness scores how crawlable and citable your site is. Visibility scores whether answer engines mention and cite you today.
How long are results cached?
Identical domain audits reuse a 24-hour cache so reloads stay fast and free.
What should I do first after I get a score?
Start with the three “do this week” priorities, then pair readiness fixes with an Answer-Engine Visibility check to see whether mentions follow.