A focused audit report.
The category visibility scorecard, lost-answer examples, evidence gaps, citation gaps, and our selected interpretation of what the pattern means for your next decision. It's built to forward internally.
AEO Audit
Seeing signs of an AEO gap? Get the benchmark that tells you what to do next.
A paid AEO Audit for companies that want a decision, not another opinion.
Your team has enough AI-answer evidence to be concerned, and not enough to make a call. We compare your brand against 3-5 named competitors across the prompts your buyers are likely to ask in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Then we tell you whether the gap is material enough to act on.
The audit answers three questions:
- Category understanding: are AI systems describing what you actually do?
- Brand inclusion: are you in the answer, absent, or weakly framed?
- Citation quality: are AI systems learning your category from sources you control, or from third parties you don't?
DELIVERED IN 10 WORKING DAYS · 3-5 NAMED COMPETITORS INCLUDED · ONE DECISION
01
A Screenshot Is A Warning Sign, Not A Benchmark
Someone in sales drops a Perplexity screenshot into the channel.
The category appears. Your name does not. A competitor does. A third-party list from two years ago is quoted as if it were authoritative.
By Friday, leadership wants to know: is this a problem, or is this one prompt?
A screenshot tells you something is happening. It doesn't tell you how often, or whether the answers matter to your buyers.
You can keep running prompts. You'll get more examples. But more examples aren't a benchmark. They just give the team more to argue with.
Before you decide what to do next, you need to know:
- whether AI systems are omitting your brand on prompts buyers actually ask
- whether competitors are being framed more clearly than you
- whether the sources AI systems trust are sources you can influence
Screenshots show you a symptom. They don't show you size.
02
The Audit Answers The Questions A Tool Report Leaves Open
Tools can show where your brand appears in AI answers. They're good at that. The part they don't settle is what to do about the pattern.
The AEO Audit is built to answer five commercial questions before you commit to a tracking tool, a pilot, a retainer, internal execution, a deeper diagnostic, or leaving the issue alone.
- Are AI systems including your brand in the category, or explaining the category around you?
- Which competitors appear more often, or with stronger framing, on the prompts your buyers are likely to run?
- Which third-party sources are shaping those answers, and are they sources you can influence?
- Of the answers you're losing, which ones matter to a buyer at the point of decision?
- Which one move is worth building, fixing, ignoring, or testing next?
Measurement gives you the readings. The audit tells you which readings should change the plan.
03
The Answer Presence Method
The method is simple on purpose. The readings are the start. The work is selecting which findings matter, what is causing them, and what to do next.
- 01
Benchmark the category.
We sample the prompts your buyers are likely to run in the main AI tools, then compare your brand against 3-5 named competitors: who appears, in what order, and with what framing.
- 02
Find the lost answers.
We isolate the prompts where you're absent, weakly included, or misframed, then rank them by how much they matter at the point of decision.
- 03
Identify evidence and citation gaps.
We trace the sources AI tools lean on, then mark where your own pages, proof, or category language are missing from the sources those tools trust.
- 04
Recommend the next move.
We turn the evidence into one judgement call: act internally, scope a pilot, run a deeper diagnostic, or leave the issue alone for now. One recommendation, tied to the readings that drove it.
04
What You Get Back
One finished audit report. One file with the receipts. One walkthrough. One recommendation.
A file with the receipts.
The prompts tested, the answers returned, the brands mentioned, the sources cited, and the URLs behind the findings. That gives your team enough to check the evidence behind the recommendation.
A 30-minute walkthrough.
We take your team through the findings live and answer questions in real time. Focused on what's worth acting on, not a replay of the full data set.
One recommended next step.
Not just a roadmap. One specific move to make now, with the reasoning tied directly to what the readings showed.
05
What This Isn't
The audit is narrow by design. Everything on this list was left out because it would inflate the scope without improving the decision you need to make before you buy a tool, brief an agency, scope a pilot, or park the issue.
Not a technical SEO audit.
We're not crawling your site or auditing schema. That keeps the audit focused on whether AI answers are creating a commercial gap, not every technical issue your site could possibly have.
Not keyword research.
The prompt set is built around buyer questions and competitive visibility, not search volume. The point is to see where your brand is missing from answers buyers might actually use.
Not a generic visibility report.
Tracking can show movement. The audit gives you the interpretation: which patterns matter, what they suggest, and what to do next.
Not a full implementation roadmap.
You get the move worth making next, with the reasoning behind it. The week-by-week backlog belongs in a diagnostic or pilot week one, once internal data has confirmed the baseline. That keeps less budget on the table while the question is still whether to act at all.
Not a revenue or pipeline guarantee.
We won't put a number in the report the evidence can't support. If the evidence supports a directional outcome, we'll say so. If it doesn't, we'll say that too. Specific targets get set against your data in pilot week one, not against ours in a pitch deck.
Not a pilot commitment.
The audit stands alone. You can act on it internally, run a pilot with us, take the findings to another partner, or wait. The recommendation travels with you either way.
If you already have an SEO partner or a tracking tool you trust, keep them. The audit isn't competing with either. It decides whether AI search is now part of their job, part of ours, or part of no one's yet. That's the decision the audit is built to make.
06
What The Audit Can Recommend
At the end of the walkthrough, we recommend one of four routes. Only one is a 90-day pilot. Two involve no further work with us at all.
- 1
Do nothing for now.
The signal is real but not material at your stage, or there are bigger fires this quarter. We'll tell you when waiting is the right call.
- 2
Use the findings internally.
Your team has enough to act. The audit report and receipts file become a brief for your existing content, SEO, or product marketing function. We close the engagement.
- 3
Run a diagnostic first.
The signal is real, but one specific question needs a deeper look before anyone commits to a build. We scope a narrower diagnostic around the uncertainty.
- 4
Scope a 90-day pilot.
The findings show a meaningful gap and a clear first test. We scope a separate engagement with its own contract.
The recommendation reflects the evidence. Sometimes that means working with us. Sometimes it means taking the findings elsewhere. Sometimes it means not acting yet.
07
What To Send Us
No analytics access, CRM data, CMS logins, sales call recordings, stakeholder interviews, or engineering involvement needed to get started.
To start, send:
- 3-5 competitors you'd benchmark yourself against
- your homepage and 5-10 key pages
- a short category description, plus positioning or ICP notes if you already have them
- any prompt examples your team has already tested
- pages you think AI systems should be citing and currently aren't
We add our own competitor and third-party source layer on top, so the list doesn't need to be exhaustive.
After you send that over, the audit usually takes 10 working days.
Request an AEO AuditOne paid audit. 10 working days. A scorecard, the receipts, a walkthrough, and one evidence-backed recommendation on your next move.
After you request the audit, we confirm scope and timing. You send the competitor list, any prompt examples you have, and the positioning notes that exist. We run the audit and book the walkthrough.