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.

What is query-answer alignment and how do I improve it?

Query-Answer Alignment measures how well your content's headings and phrasing match the natural language questions users ask AI engines. Generic headings like "Overview" or "Features" don't match any real queries. Rewrite them as questions users actually ask: "How Much Does Live Chat Cost?" or "How Do I Set Up AI Support?" Use your visibility report's MISS queries as a roadmap.

How does direct answer density work?

Direct Answer Density (5% weight) measures how consistently your content leads with the answer right after each heading. AI doesn't read full articles - it scans headings and grabs the first 1-2 sentences. If those sentences contain filler ("In today's fast-paced world..."), AI moves on. Lead every section with a concrete fact or answer, then elaborate. This applies to all headings, not just questions.

petabolix.com - AEO Audit Report | 62/100

petabolix.com

Moderate AI visibility with 34 of 48 criteria passing. Biggest gap: rss/atom feed.

Developer Tools & Infrastructure Cloud Infrastructure

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%6/10+9.0

FAQ Sections10%1/10+1.0

Original Data10%5/10+5.0

Content Freshness7%8/10+5.6

Direct Answer Paragraphs7%7/10+4.9

Fact & Data Density5%10/10+5.0

Definition Patterns4%9/10+3.6

Query-Answer Alignment8%0/10+0.0

Content Cannibalization5%10/10+5.0

Subtotal71%+39.1

Structure5 criteria

Schema.org JSON-LD15%8/10+12.0

Clean, Crawlable HTML10%8/10+8.0

Semantic HTML55%6/10+3.0

Table & List Extractability7%5/10+3.5

Schema Coverage3%7/10+2.1

Subtotal40%+28.6

Discovery5 criteria

llms.txt10%8/10+8.0

robots.txt for AI5%10/10+5.0

Internal Linking10%8/10+8.0

Sitemap Completeness5%9/10+4.5

RSS/Atom Feed3%0/10+0.0

Subtotal33%+25.5

Trust Signals6 criteria

Entity Authority10%7/10+7.0

Content Licensing4%4/10+1.6

Author & Expert Schema4%4/10+1.6

Canonical URL4%10/10+4.0

Content Velocity3%10/10+3.0

Visible Date Signals4%8/10+3.2

Subtotal29%+20.4

Overall Score100%62/100

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 v1

Citation Avg

Answer Readiness

~40% weight

8/10

Content Structure

~25% weight

5/10

Trust & Authority

~15% weight

6/10

Technical Foundation

~10% weight

6/10

AI Discovery

~10% weight

8/10

Verdict

Moderate AEO readiness at 62/100 with significant gaps to address. Key strengths include robots.txt for AI Crawlers, Fact & Data Density, and Canonical URL Strategy. Priority gaps: RSS/Atom Feed, Speakable Schema, and Query-Answer Alignment.

Top priorities

RSS/Atom FeedDiscovery+10 pts

Speakable SchemaTechnical+10 pts

Query-Answer AlignmentStructure+10 pts

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Ahead of you

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How to Improve

Current

62/100

Projected

84/100

39Total Fixes

6Quick Wins

~80hEst. Effort

Quick Wins

Create /llms.txt fileAdd ai.txt and content licensingEnhance author and expert schemaPackage evidence for AI enginesReduce extraction frictionReduce document weight

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 render-blocking resources

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

critical

medium

Reduce render-blocking resources

critical|medium

Reduce document weight

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

high

low

Reduce document weight

high|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

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Top Opportunities10

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Score Breakdown

Criteria

Status

Potential

Score

RSS/Atom Feed

critical+10 pts0/10

Speakable Schema

critical+10 pts0/10

Query-Answer Alignment

critical+10 pts0/10

Comprehensive FAQ Section

critical+9 pts1/10

Image Context for AI

critical+9 pts1/10

First-Hand Experience Signals

critical+7 pts3/10

Methodology Transparency

critical+7 pts3/10

Evidence Packaging

critical+7 pts3/10

Internationalization Signals

critical+7 pts3/10

Page Speed: Load Blockers

critical+7 pts3/10

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Site Pages

URLCitationSiteIn-linksCategoryIssuesWords

www.petabolix.com/dog-breed-nutritionDog Food and Nutrition by Breed

D44

content

1,228

www.petabolix.com/dog-breed-nutritionD44

Dog Food and Nutrition by Breed

Changes since v1Last audited 29 days ago

→

View full comparison →

Criterion

Delta

Entity Authority & NAP Consistency

5/10

7/10

Internal Linking Structure

7/10

8/10

Content Licensing & AI Permissions

2/10

4/10

Fact & Data Density

8/10

10/10

Content Publishing Velocity

7/10

10/10

Answer-First Placement

8/10

10/10

Page Speed: Server Response

5/10

6/10

Page Speed: Page Size

5/10

4/10

-1

Add Owned Data SignalsStrengthen Entity Authority (NAP)

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

Query-Answer Alignment: Does Your Content Match What People Actually Ask?

You wrote a 3,000-word guide on "customer support automation." But people ask AI "how do I reduce support ticket volume?" If your content doesn't match the actual queries, AI can't connect the dots.

Beginner·8 min readRead guide →

Criteria1/10

FAQ Sections: 87 Questions Turned Our Score Into 88

Our site runs 87 FAQ items across 9 categories with FAQPage schema on every one. That's not excessive -it's how we hit 88/100. Each Q&A pair is a citation opportunity AI can extract in seconds.

Intermediate·8 min readRead guide →

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Verdict

How to Improve

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Top Opportunities10

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Fix It With AI39

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Score Breakdown

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