An AEO audit measures your visibility in AI-powered search engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity). Our proprietary 7-phase framework covers query inventory, current AI visibility, content structure, entity authority, competitive analysis, technical health, and actionable gaps. This guide doubles as your audit template.
AI-powered search is now a top 5 channel for customer discovery. ChatGPT alone has 200+ million weekly active users. Google AI Overviews appear in 30%+ of searches. Perplexity is growing 400%+ year-over-year.
Yet most B2B companies haven't audited their AI visibility. You might rank #3 for "programmatic SEO agency" on Google, but ChatGPT has never heard of you. That's a massive gap.
An AEO audit quantifies this gap and creates a roadmap to close it. For B2B SaaS, we typically see 40-80% increases in inbound volume within 6 months of implementing an AEO strategy.
Goal: List the 50-100 queries your target audience uses to find you or your solution.
How: Pull your top queries from Google Search Console (organic keywords with 100+ impressions). Add competitor keywords (use SEMrush or Ahrefs). Ask your sales team: "What do prospects search for before contacting you?" Ask support: "What questions do customers ask in early conversations?" Categorize queries by intent: Solution awareness ("What is programmatic SEO?"), evaluation ("Programmatic SEO vs manual"), provider comparison ("Best programmatic SEO agency").
Output: Spreadsheet with 50-100 target queries, categorized by intent, with estimated monthly search volume and current ranking position.
Goal: For each target query, determine if and where you appear in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity.
How: For each query, open ChatGPT with web browsing enabled and search. Note: Does your brand or content appear in the response? Are you cited by name? Take a screenshot. Do the same for Google (search the query, note if AI Overview appears, check if you're cited). Do the same for Perplexity. Use this framework:
Output: Visibility matrix (rows = queries, columns = platforms, cells = visibility score). Calculate aggregate visibility score (sum of all scores / max possible).
Goal: For your top 20 target pages, assess whether they're optimized for AI readability.
How: For each page, check:
Output: Content audit spreadsheet with scores (0-10 scale) for each dimension. Flag pages that need restructuring.
Goal: Measure your brand's trust signals across Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase, and industry databases.
How: For your company, check:
Output: Entity authority scorecard. Identify gaps (e.g., "Wikidata profile incomplete," "No Wikipedia page," "Founder should publish more LinkedIn posts").
Goal: Identify which competitors ARE appearing in AI search—and why.
How: For your top 10 target queries, note which competitors appear in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. Analyze those pages: Do they have better schema? Faster load times? More original data? Better entity signals? This tells you what's working in your space.
Output: Competitive positioning matrix (rows = competitors, columns = queries, cells = whether they're cited). Analyze the top-cited competitor's top-cited page. What makes it work?
Goal: Verify that your site meets Google and ChatGPT's technical requirements.
How: For each target page, check:
Output: Technical scorecard with pass/fail for each requirement. Prioritize fixes by impact.
Goal: Synthesize findings into a prioritized roadmap.
How: For each of your top 20 target queries, identify the highest-impact improvement:
Output: 90-day action plan with specific tasks, owners, and deadlines. Prioritize by: (1) Current visibility gap, (2) Effort required, (3) Estimated impact.
Company: A programmatic SEO platform with $2M ARR.
Audit findings: Ranked #4 for "programmatic SEO platform" on Google, but not cited by ChatGPT. Why? Their home page was 1,500 words with no FAQ section and no schema markup. Competitor (ranking #7) had FAQ schema and was cited 3x more often.
Quick wins (implemented): Added FAQPage schema (10 Q&A pairs). Restructured homepage with lists and tables (moved word count to 2,800). Added dateModified schema and updated monthly. Added Wikidata profile with complete founding/funding/team data.
Results: Within 4 weeks, ChatGPT started citing them. Within 8 weeks, they appeared in Google AI Overviews for 4 target queries. Organic rank improved to #2 (likely due to AI Overviews boosting trust signal). Monthly organic visits increased 31%.
Only auditing organic keywords. AI visibility doesn't perfectly correlate with organic ranking. ChatGPT cares about entity trust and answer-first content, not just ranking position. Always audit your entity signals and content structure separately.
Forgetting Perplexity and other engines. ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews are big, but not the only players. Perplexity is growing rapidly. You Meta AI is coming. Audit across at least 2-3 platforms.
Not fixing Web Vitals. Many companies focus on schema markup and miss the fact that their pages load in 5 seconds. Core Web Vitals are a hard gate for AI Overviews. Fix those first.
Ignoring entity authority. You can optimize content forever, but if your company has no Wikipedia/Wikidata presence, you'll plateau in AI visibility. Build entity authority early.
Semrush AI Visibility: Shows which of your pages ChatGPT cites for which queries. Updates daily. Best tool for tracking progress.
Google PageSpeed Insights: Free. Essential for Core Web Vitals assessment.
Google Rich Results Test: Free. Validates schema markup.
Google Search Console: Free. Shows impressions and rankings. Critical baseline data.
Brand24: Monitors AI mentions across platforms. Helps identify new citation opportunities.
For a company with 50-100 target keywords and 20+ core pages, expect 4-6 weeks with one person part-time (10 hours/week). With a team, you can compress it to 2-3 weeks. The bottleneck is manual AI visibility checking (no tool automates this fully yet).
If you have an in-house marketer with 30+ hours to spare, you can do it yourself. If not, hiring an agency (like Marketing Enigma) saves time and gets a second opinion. Budget: $5k-$15k for a thorough audit.
Run a full audit once a year. But check your AI visibility monthly (using Semrush AI Visibility or manual checks for your top 10 queries). This gives you fast feedback on whether your changes are working.
You can't optimize for AI Overviews if you're not ranking. Focus on traditional SEO first (backlinks, keyword research, content depth). Once you hit top-10 for 10+ queries, then optimize for AEO.
Absolutely. The audit quantifies the opportunity ("You're invisible in AI search but competitors aren't"). Use this to justify an AEO investment. Most B2B companies see ROI within 6 months.
Ready to audit your AI visibility? Book a free AI Visibility Audit and get a custom report with your visibility score, top opportunities, and a 90-day action plan.