What is AEO / GEO?
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are about being understood and cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews, not just ranking ten blue links. The fundamentals overlap with SEO, but a few signals matter specifically for AI: structured data, an llms.txt, a clean sitemap, and crucially not blocking the AI crawlers.
What this tool checks (and why)
This checker fetches your page plus its robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and llms.txt, then grades:
AI / answer-engine readiness
- AI crawlers allowed, many sites accidentally
Disallow: /for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot. If you want citations, let them in. - Structured data (JSON-LD), tells engines and models exactly what your page is.
- XML sitemap, the source of truth for what to crawl.
- llms.txt, the emerging standard that describes your site to AI crawlers. Most sites don't have one yet.
Core SEO foundations
- HTTPS, a single
<h1>, a<title>under ~60 characters, and a meta description. - A canonical URL, Open Graph tags for rich link previews, and a mobile viewport.
How the score works
Each check carries a weight; your score is the percentage of weight you pass, mapped to a grade (A-F). It's a directional readiness signal, not an exhaustive audit. Treat a low score as a to-do list, starting with the failed AI-readiness items.
FAQ
Does a high score guarantee AI citations?
No. This measures whether your site is technically ready to be crawled, parsed, and understood. Citations also depend on genuinely useful, well-structured content, but if you fail these checks, you're invisible before content even matters.
Why does it care about robots.txt and AI crawlers?
Because the single most common own-goal is blocking the very crawlers you want to cite you. Engines like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended must be allowed to read your pages.
Do you store the URLs I check?
No. The check runs in an isolated service that holds none of our data, and the result isn't logged or saved. We also never return the fetched page itself, only the pass/fail scores.
Sources & citations
- Google Search Central , title links and length guidance.
- Schema.org , structured-data vocabulary.
- llmstxt.org , the llms.txt standard.
- IndexNow , instant submission to Bing/Yandex.
Don't have an llms.txt yet? Build one with our free llms.txt generator. This checker is from Reclipt, the AI search engine for your video library. We write about searching inside videos and finding a specific quote in a video, and you can see pricing here.