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.

matchaful.com - AEO Audit Report | 59/100

matchaful.com

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

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.

Moderate 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%4/10+6.0

FAQ Sections10%7/10+7.0

Original Data10%8/10+8.0

Content Freshness7%8/10+5.6

Direct Answer Paragraphs7%10/10+7.0

Fact & Data Density5%8/10+4.0

Definition Patterns4%7/10+2.8

Query-Answer Alignment8%7/10+5.6

Content Cannibalization5%10/10+5.0

Subtotal71%+51.0

Structure5 criteria

Schema.org JSON-LD15%9/10+13.5

Clean, Crawlable HTML10%7/10+7.0

Semantic HTML55%8/10+4.0

Table & List Extractability7%5/10+3.5

Schema Coverage3%10/10+3.0

Subtotal40%+31.0

Discovery5 criteria

llms.txt10%10/10+10.0

robots.txt for AI5%5/10+2.5

Internal Linking10%8/10+8.0

Sitemap Completeness5%10/10+5.0

RSS/Atom Feed3%0/10+0.0

Subtotal33%+25.5

Trust Signals6 criteria

Entity Authority10%6/10+6.0

Content Licensing4%4/10+1.6

Author & Expert Schema4%7/10+2.8

Canonical URL4%10/10+4.0

Content Velocity3%7/10+2.1

Visible Date Signals4%9/10+3.6

Subtotal29%+20.1

Overall Score100%59/100

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 →

↑2 since v2

Citation Avg

Answer Readiness

~40% weight

6/10

Content Structure

~25% weight

7/10

Trust & Authority

~15% weight

6/10

Technical Foundation

~10% weight

6/10

AI Discovery

~10% weight

7/10

Verdict

Below-average AEO readiness at 59/100 - multiple areas need attention. Key strengths include llms.txt File, Sitemap Completeness, and Direct Answer Paragraphs. Priority gaps: RSS/Atom Feed, Speakable Schema, and Entity Disambiguation.

Top priorities

RSS/Atom FeedDiscovery+10 pts

Speakable SchemaTechnical+10 pts

Entity DisambiguationStructure+10 pts

#1118of 13362

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How to Improve

Current

59/100

Projected

82/100

40Total Fixes

7Quick Wins

~76hEst. Effort

Quick Wins

Create /llms.txt fileConfigure robots.txt for AI crawlersAdd ai.txt and content licensingMake pages solve the user task fasterReduce extraction frictionEliminate cross-page duplicate contentReduce render-blocking resources

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

Reduce document weight

Trim oversized HTML, excessive DOM nodes, and large inline payloads that slow AI crawlers.

critical

medium

Reduce document weight

critical|medium

Fix HTML structure and meta tags

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

medium

low

Fix HTML structure and meta tags

medium|low

Reduce render-blocking resources

Minimize blocking scripts and stylesheets in <head> to improve content availability for AI crawlers.

high

low

Reduce render-blocking resources

high|low

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Top Opportunities10

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Fix It With AI41

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Score Breakdown

Criteria

Status

Potential

Score

RSS/Atom Feed

critical+10 pts0/10

Speakable Schema

critical+10 pts0/10

Entity Disambiguation

critical+10 pts0/10

Owned Data Density

critical+10 pts0/10

Image Context for AI

critical+9 pts1/10

First-Hand Experience Signals

critical+8 pts2/10

Creator Transparency

critical+8 pts2/10

Methodology Transparency

critical+8 pts2/10

Answer Capsule Pattern

critical+8 pts2/10

Answer-First Placement

critical+7 pts3/10

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Site Pages

URLCitationSiteIn-linksCategoryIssuesWords

www.matchaful.com/pages/matcha-guideMatcha Guide – Matchaful

F32

blog

678

www.matchaful.com/pages/matcha-guideF32

Matcha Guide – Matchaful

www.matchaful.com/pages/the-history-of-matchaThe History of Matcha – Matchaful

F33

content

664

www.matchaful.com/pages/the-history-of-matchaF33

The History of Matcha – Matchaful

Changes since v2Last audited 29 days ago

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View full comparison →

Criterion

Delta

llms.txt File

0/10

10/10

+10

Q&A Content Format

5/10

4/10

-1

Query-Answer Alignment

4/10

7/10

Content Depth

4/10

5/10

Helpful Purpose Alignment

6/10

5/10

-1

Citation-Ready Writing Quality

10/10

8/10

-2

Duplicate Content Blocks

7/10

9/10

Cross-Page Duplicate Content

5/10

7/10

Sentence Atomicity

6/10

8/10

Strengthen Entity Authority (NAP)Improve Question-Answer Alignment

Improve Your Score

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

Entity Disambiguation: Stop Making AI Guess What You Mean

You say "Mercury" on your homepage. The planet? The element? The banking startup? AI doesn't know - and when it can't tell, it doesn't cite. Entity disambiguation is how you draw clear lines around what your business is and isn't.

Intermediate·5 min readRead guide →

Criteria1/10

Image Context for AI: Your Pictures Are Worth Zero Words Without Markup

AI can't see your images. It reads the markup around them. A product photo with alt="image1.jpg" tells AI nothing. A figure with a descriptive figcaption and 8-word alt text tells AI exactly what it's looking at - and that context feeds directly into citation decisions.

Beginner·3 min readRead guide →

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Verdict

How to Improve

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Top Opportunities10

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Fix It With AI41

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Score Breakdown

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