What are the 48 AEO criteria?

The 48 criteria are organized into 5 pillars with fixed target shares: Answer Readiness 40%, Content Structure 25%, Trust & Authority 15%, Technical Foundation 10%, and AI Discovery 10%. Inside those pillars, criteria cover topic coherence, original data, depth, fact density, direct answers, Q&A structure, entity authority, freshness, visible dates, schema, semantic HTML, extraction friction, llms.txt, robots.txt, licensing, canonicals, sitemap coverage, and RSS. Each criterion is scored 0–10, converted into an effective weight after confidence and overlap controls, then rolled into the final score.

What does the RSS feed audit check?

The audit verifies your site has a discoverable RSS or Atom feed with proper metadata. It checks feed existence at common paths, a link tag in the HTML head, adequate item count, and pubDate per item. RSS feeds let AI indexing systems detect new content automatically without waiting for a full crawl.

What are conditional audit criteria?

Conditional criteria are checks that only apply to certain site types. Product/Offer schema applies only to e-commerce. Hreflang only to multilingual sites. ai.txt/TDM policy only to sites with substantial original content. Speakable schema was previously conditional but is now an active scored criterion in the 48-criteria framework. The remaining conditional criteria supplement the 34 universal audit criteria.

Why do I need visible dates on my content pages?

Visible Date Signal checks whether your pages display clear publication and update dates. AI engines have a recency bias - content without visible dates gets treated as potentially stale, even if it was published recently. Add both "Published" and "Last Updated" dates to your article template, and match them with datePublished and dateModified in your Article schema.

Can I request a re-audit of my website?

Yes. After making improvements based on audit recommendations, request a fresh audit to see your updated score. Each re-audit creates a new version you can compare against previous ones to quantify progress.

customily.com - AEO Audit Report | 46/100

SUMMER 2021 customily.com

Weak AI visibility with 31 of 48 criteria passing. Biggest gap: rss/atom feed.

E-commerce E-commerce Platforms

Scoring Methodology

How Your AEO Site Rank Is Calculated

A weighted average of 48 deterministic criteria. Each scored 0-10, each with a specific weight. No AI judgment calls - every point is traceable.

Weak visibilityOut of 100 possible points

The Formula

Score = sum(criterion_score / 10 * weight * 100) / sum(weights)

Each criterion is scored 0-10 by deterministic checks, multiplied by its weight, and summed to produce a 0-100 overall score.

Your Score Breakdown

Content9 criteria

Q&A Content Format15%8/10+12.0

FAQ Sections10%10/10+10.0

Original Data10%6/10+6.0

Content Freshness7%2/10+1.4

Direct Answer Paragraphs7%10/10+7.0

Fact & Data Density5%6/10+3.0

Definition Patterns4%7/10+2.8

Query-Answer Alignment8%7/10+5.6

Content Cannibalization5%6/10+3.0

Subtotal71%+50.8

Structure5 criteria

Schema.org JSON-LD15%10/10+15.0

Clean, Crawlable HTML10%8/10+8.0

Semantic HTML55%7/10+3.5

Table & List Extractability7%5/10+3.5

Schema Coverage3%9/10+2.7

Subtotal40%+32.7

Discovery5 criteria

llms.txt10%8/10+8.0

robots.txt for AI5%10/10+5.0

Internal Linking10%8/10+8.0

Sitemap Completeness5%7/10+3.5

RSS/Atom Feed3%0/10+0.0

Subtotal33%+24.5

Trust Signals6 criteria

Entity Authority10%8/10+8.0

Content Licensing4%2/10+0.8

Author & Expert Schema4%4/10+1.6

Canonical URL4%10/10+4.0

Content Velocity3%2/10+0.6

Visible Date Signals4%0/10+0.0

Subtotal29%+15.0

Overall Score100%46/100

Score Ranges

86-100AI-first content architecture

71-85Strong AI visibility

56-70Moderate visibility

41-55Weak visibility

26-40Minimal visibility

0-25Not on the radar

Key Points

Topic Coherence carries the highest weight at 14%, followed by Original Data at 10%, across 48 total criteria.

No HTTPS means Clean HTML is capped at 3/10, costing approximately 3-4 overall points.

Every criterion uses deterministic checks. Same site, same audit, same score - every time.

Read full scoring methodology →

Citation Avg

Coherence gate active - score capped at 50

Answer Readiness

~40% weight

5/10

Content Structure

~25% weight

8/10

Trust & Authority

~15% weight

5/10

Technical Foundation

~10% weight

5/10

AI Discovery

~10% weight

6/10

Verdict

Below-average AEO readiness at 46/100 - multiple areas need attention. Key strengths include Schema.org Structured Data, robots.txt for AI Crawlers, and Comprehensive FAQ Section. Priority gaps: RSS/Atom Feed, Speakable Schema, and Visible Date Signal. Topic coherence is 3/10, which caps the overall score at 50. Focusing content on core expertise areas is the single highest-impact improvement.

Top priorities

RSS/Atom FeedDiscovery+10 pts

Speakable SchemaTechnical+10 pts

Visible Date SignalTechnical+10 pts

#7883of 13362

#107of 237 in E-commerce

Ahead of you

eventnoire.com46

onwarddelivery.com46

View full rankings →

View improvement plan

How to Improve

Current

46/100

Projected

83/100

38Total Fixes

10Quick Wins

~65hEst. Effort

Quick Wins

Create /llms.txt fileAdd structured tables and listsAdd ai.txt and content licensingEnhance author and expert schemaAdd visible date signalsMake pages solve the user task fasterPackage evidence for AI enginesClarify entity boundariesReduce extraction frictionAdd image context for AI engines

Fix

Impact

Effort

Create /llms.txt file

Add a machine-readable llms.txt file at your domain root that describes your site, services, and key pages for AI engines.

critical

low

Create /llms.txt file

critical|low

Add llms-full.txt with extended content

Create a comprehensive llms-full.txt with detailed page descriptions, content summaries, and topic taxonomy.

medium

low

Add llms-full.txt with extended content

medium|low

Fix HTML structure and meta tags

Ensure clean, well-structured HTML with proper meta tags, HTTPS, and parseable content for AI crawlers.

low

Fix HTML structure and meta tags

low|low

Create complete sitemap.xml

Generate a comprehensive sitemap with lastmod dates for all important pages.

medium

low

Create complete sitemap.xml

medium|low

Add internationalization signals

Implement hreflang tags and lang attributes so AI engines serve the correct language version when answering queries.

critical

medium

Add internationalization signals

critical|medium

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Top Opportunities10

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Fix It With AI42

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Score Breakdown

Criteria

Status

Potential

Score

RSS/Atom Feed

critical+10 pts0/10

Speakable Schema

critical+10 pts0/10

Visible Date Signal

critical+10 pts0/10

Owned Data Density

critical+10 pts0/10

Content Freshness Signals

critical+8 pts2/10

Content Licensing & AI Permissions

critical+8 pts2/10

Content Publishing Velocity

critical+8 pts2/10

Methodology Transparency

critical+8 pts2/10

Image Context for AI

critical+8 pts2/10

Topic Coherence

critical+7 pts3/10

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Site Pages

URLCitationSiteIn-linksCategoryIssuesWords

www.customily.com/policy/clipart-licenseClipart License Agreement | Customily Product Customizer

F32

blog

1,982

www.customily.com/policy/clipart-licenseF32

Clipart License Agreement | Customily Product Customizer

www.customily.com/blog-vnBlog Vietnamese

F32

blog

898

www.customily.com/blog-vnF32

Blog Vietnamese

www.customily.com/post/13-effective-ways-to-increase-your...13 effective ways to increase your e-commerce sales 🛒

D40

blog

2,857

www.customily.com/post/13-effective-ways-to-increase-your...D40

13 effective ways to increase your e-commerce sales 🛒

www.customily.com/post/20-tips-to-get-ready-for-this-ho-h...20 tips to get ready for this HO-HO-HOLIDAYS 🎄🎅🏻

F35

blog

2,788

www.customily.com/post/20-tips-to-get-ready-for-this-ho-h...F35

20 tips to get ready for this HO-HO-HOLIDAYS 🎄🎅🏻

www.customily.com/post/7-steps-to-create-striking-print-o...7 Steps to Create Striking Print-on-Demand Business Names

D41

blog

2,473

www.customily.com/post/7-steps-to-create-striking-print-o...D41

7 Steps to Create Striking Print-on-Demand Business Names

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Guides for the criteria with the most room for improvement

Criteria0/10

RSS Feed Presence & Quality

Sitemaps tell crawlers what exists. RSS feeds tell them what changed. If you don't have one, your new content waits days -or weeks -to be discovered.

Beginner·3 min readRead guide →

supplementary0/10

Speakable Schema Markup

Voice assistants need to pick which paragraph to read aloud from your page. Without Speakable markup, they guess -and they frequently guess wrong, reading your cookie notice.

Beginner·3 min readRead guide →

Criteria0/10

Visible Date Signal: The Freshness Cue AI Checks Before Citing You

AI engines are biased toward recency. An article with no visible date is an article AI can't trust to be current. Visible Date Signal measures whether your pages show clear publication and update dates that both humans and machines can read.

Beginner·5 min readRead guide →

Criteria2/10

Content Freshness Signals

No date on your page? AI engines treat it like a rumor -undated and deprioritized. Here's how we audit whether your timestamps are actually machine-readable.

Beginner·5 min readRead guide →

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Verdict

How to Improve

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Top Opportunities10

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Fix It With AI42

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Score Breakdown

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Site Pages

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