AEO Readiness Audit (Answer Engine Optimisation)
As more people find information through AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot, being visible in search results is no longer enough.
Your website also needs to be the kind of source these tools choose to cite. That's what Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO, is about: making your content easy for AI systems to find, trust, and quote.
Our in-house team combines technical SEO expertise with hands-on experience auditing AI citation behaviour, helping you understand not just how your site ranks, but how likely it is to be picked up and cited as a trustworthy source.
There's considerable overlap between traditional SEO and AEO, particularly on the technical side, so we'd recommend running an AEO audit alongside our SEO Audit where possible. Doing both together avoids duplicating work like the technical crawl, and gives you a fuller picture of how your site performs across both traditional search and AI answer engines.
The Importance of AEO for NGOs and Non-Profits
For organisations in the non-profit and values-driven sector, this shift matters more than most realise. Your content is often genuinely authoritative: research-backed, evidence-based, written by people with real expertise. But that authority is frequently buried in long-form prose without the structural signals AI systems look for, like clear headings, schema markup, and direct answers to common questions.
The result is a gap.
Organisations doing the most rigorous work are often the least visible in AI-generated answers, while less reliable sources with better technical structure get cited instead. An AEO audit closes that gap, helping your expertise get recognised by the tools people increasingly use to find information.
Our audits focus on how to increase visitor engagement on your site, identifying weaknesses, opportunities, and areas for improvement.
All our AEO work is tailored to your organisation, audience, content resources, competitor landscape, and wider digital marketing efforts.
Book Your Free Consultation with Michael
The consultation includes:
- a discussion of your organisational needs
- what gaps might exist in your knowledge and skills
- a general introduction to AEO and our ways of working
Our AEO Audit Process
Step 1: Comprehensive Audit
We start with a site-wide technical audit, then assess your priority pages against four further dimensions that determine how likely they are to be cited by AI answer engines.
- Site-wide technical audit: Before AI systems can cite your content, they need to be able to crawl and access it. We check robots.txt configuration to make sure AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot aren't accidentally blocked, along with HTTPS, canonical tags, and crawl depth. Where available, we also review server log files to see which AI crawlers are actually visiting your site, how often, and which pages they're reaching, giving us real evidence of crawl behaviour rather than assumptions.
- E-E-A-T audit: We evaluate the experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness signals AI systems use to judge whether a source is worth citing, including author credentials, sourcing, and editorial transparency.
- Schema and structured data audit: We check what schema markup is present across your site and where it's missing, since structured data helps AI systems understand and extract your content accurately.
- Citability audit: We look at how your content is structured on the page, whether it answers questions directly, uses clear headings, and is written in a way that's easy for AI systems to quote and attribute correctly.
- Zero-click and AI visibility analysis: Using Google Search Console data, we identify where your pages are already appearing in AI Overviews and other zero-click results, and where there's untapped opportunity.
Step 2: Reporting and Recommendations
You'll receive a detailed report scoring each priority page and your site as a whole, with clear, actionable recommendations covering:
- Immediate technical fixes, such as missing or incorrect schema
- Content restructuring to improve citability
- Longer-term strategy for building the trust signals AI systems look for
Step 3: Implementation Support
- Direct site optimisations
- Editor and content team training, so your team can maintain AEO best practice going forward
- Developer coordination for schema and technical implementation
Testimonial
The AEO audit gave us something we hadn't had before: real evidence of how AI tools were representing our research, and a clear plan to make sure our work gets found and cited correctly. Michael and the team explained a genuinely new area of search in a way that made sense for our team, and the recommendations were practical, not just theoretical.
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