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Audit methodology

We publish exactly how each number is produced so you can judge how much weight to give it. GoAEO reports two separate things, and we never merge them into a single score.

Last updated August 2026

1. Website readiness score (measured)

We fetch your page over HTTPS with the user agent GoAEOBot, plus /robots.txt and /sitemap.xml on the same host. Nothing is executed; we parse the HTML we receive. Each check is deterministic and weighted, and the score is the share of weight passed.

  • AI crawler access: site-wide disallow rules and per-agent rules for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and Bingbot.
  • Indexability and technical health: robots meta directives, sitemap availability, canonical URL.
  • Structured data and schema: presence and validity of JSON-LD, including FAQPage.
  • Entity and brand clarity: Organization or LocalBusiness node and sameAs profile links.
  • Answer-ready page structure: title, description, single H1, question-shaped subheadings, depth of visible copy.
  • Author and company credibility: named authors, team and about signals, reachable contact details.
  • Internal linking and coverage: internal anchors discovered on the page.
  • Third-party authority signals: outbound references to other domains and your own profiles.

Limits worth knowing: we read the HTML your server returns, so content rendered only in the browser after JavaScript runs may not be counted. We audit the URL you enter, not every page on the site.

2. AI visibility view (estimated)

The visibility view is produced by a language model reasoning about the entity signals a company of your size, industry and market typically has. We do not query ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Perplexity, Copilot or Google AI Overviews live, and we do not scrape their answers.

It is therefore an estimate of likelihood, not evidence of a ranking, a citation or a mention. Treat it as a directional prompt for discussion. Anywhere it appears in the product it is labelled as an estimate.

3. What every finding must answer

  • What did we find?
  • What evidence supports it, taken from your live site?
  • Why does it matter for AI search?
  • What exactly should you change?
  • Who should own the change?
  • How will GoAEO verify it afterwards?

Findings are grouped into Do now, Do next and Later by weight and effort. Pressing verify re-fetches your live site and re-runs that specific check, then records the result.

4. What we do not claim

GoAEO does not guarantee that you will appear in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot or Google AI Overviews. Those systems are closed, change frequently, and no vendor controls them. What we commit to is prioritized, evidence-backed guidance and a measurable improvement in your readiness score, verified against your live site.