AEO Audit Checklist: 15 Technical Checks for Any Public Site

Direct answer: to audit a live public site, verify three things:

• Ordinary search crawlers and the search-specific agents you want can reach it.
• Each page is indexable and canonical.
• The visible information is accurate.

These checks improve technical eligibility. They do not guarantee a citation or recommendation.

AEOprobe labels checks by evidence level: confirmed requirements, web fundamentals, useful heuristics, and experimental signals. Work through the list below as a recurring audit, then measure real impressions, referrals, audits, and sign-ups.

Launching a SaaS product and want the short pre-launch version? Use the AI-search launch checklist for SaaS founders. This post is the longer audit for sites that are already live.

Access and crawler policy

1. Return a successful public response. The canonical URL of each key page should return a stable 200 response without authentication, bot challenges, or a redirect loop.
2. Keep robots.txt reachable. Serve it from the origin root and make sure its wildcard rules do not accidentally block the entire public site.
3. Allow the search agents you intend to support. Review OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot, and Bingbot separately.
4. Decide on training independently. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended are not interchangeable with the corresponding search controls.
5. Treat user-fetch agents separately. ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, and Perplexity-User represent user-requested retrieval and may follow different access rules.

Indexability and identity

6. Do not ship an accidental noindex. Check both HTML robots metadata and X-Robots-Tag headers.
7. Set one clean canonical. Tracking-parameter variants should point to the same clean public URL.
8. Publish a useful title and description. They should describe the product and intended user without unsupported superlatives.
9. Use accurate organization and product metadata. Structured data must match visible content and current pricing. It is descriptive, not a citation shortcut.
10. Expose real ownership and contact information. Link to an About page, methodology, and a working contact route.

Discovery and rendering

11. Include the page in an accurate sitemap. Use a real modification date and do not include redirects, auth pages, or noindexed pages.
12. Link to the page contextually. Navigation alone is not enough. Relevant product, documentation, and launch pages should reference it.
13. Render the critical answer in initial HTML. Product name, audience, capability, pricing context, and documentation links should not depend on a client-only request.
14. Make the page work for people. Mobile usability, accessible names, alt text, readable structure, HTTPS, and reliable performance are worthwhile web fundamentals.
15. Measure the outcome. Record landing page, audit start, audit completion, report share, and sign-up without sending audited site addresses to analytics.

What this checklist does not prove

It does not prove that a site is indexed by every vendor, that a model understands the brand correctly, or that the brand is mentioned for a commercial prompt. Those outcomes require vendor-specific inspection, live prompt monitoring, and first-party conversion data.

Run a free technical audit to turn these checks into a list of findings to fix. The audit covers up to 3 pages and needs no sign-up.