AEO audits
A written record of how answer engines currently treat your company: which questions cite you, which cite someone else, and which pages are doing the work.
Answer engine optimization
Be the source an assistant cites.
Buyers are asking assistants before they visit a website. Felix finds out whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and AI agents cite you, and improves the material they can quote.
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Perplexity
- Google AI Overviews
- AI agents
01
The short list got shorter
Buyers increasingly ask an assistant instead of scanning a page of links. The assistant answers in a few sentences and names a handful of sources.
If your company is not one of those sources, that buyer may never reach you. A conventional search ranking does not guarantee a citation. Assistants use pages they can parse, claims they can check, and entities they can tell apart. Most company sites were written for a person skimming, not for a system extracting an answer.
A ranking is not a citation.
02
Two ways to engage
An audit tells you where you stand. Optimization is the work of changing it.
Ongoing AEO optimization
The changes that follow the audit. We revise the pages, facts, and structure assistants rely on, then check whether the citations moved.
03
How an audit works
The free audit is a working pass, not a sample deck. We agree on the questions, run them, read the site, and send what we found.
- 1
Buyer questions
We agree on prompts a real buyer would ask: what the category is, how options compare, and who is worth hiring or buying. We write them down. There is no hidden score.
- 2
Citation record
We run those questions in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, and through an agent workflow when your buyers use one. We save who is named and which URLs are cited.
- 3
Site reading
We read the pages those systems could have used. We look at structure, definitions, proof, and whether the useful facts are stated plainly enough to quote.
- 4
Findings
You receive the questions, the citations, the gaps that explain them, and the order we would work on them.
04
What optimization includes
Ongoing optimization is a separate engagement, scoped after the audit if you want the findings put into the site and kept current.
- Rewriting pages that should be quoted, so the offer, the audience, and the proof are explicit.
- Separating your company, product, and people from similarly named entities an assistant might confuse with you.
- Adding or correcting the reference material buyers already ask for: comparisons, definitions, and documentation, written as answers rather than slogans.
- Fitting the work to the SEO and content you already have, rather than standing up a parallel set of filler pages.
- Re-running the question set on a schedule you choose, and changing course from what moved.
We do not sell placement inside a model. We change what a careful system can find and quote. Assistants still choose their sources.
05
From a URL to a body of work
- 1
Tell us the site
Send the form. We reply by email with a few questions about the category and the buyer, or we tell you if we should not take the work.
- 2
Audit
We run the agreed questions, read the site, and send findings. The free audit is this pass.
- 3
Decide
You can stop after the findings. If the gaps are worth closing, we agree on a scope for ongoing optimization.
- 4
Optimize and check
We change the pages and the facts those systems draw on, then run the same questions again and keep only the work that is still useful.
06
Questions
What is AEO?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of making a company understandable and citable in AI answers. It covers ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the sources AI agents retrieve. It overlaps with SEO. The result we are after is a citation inside an answer, not a blue link on a search results page.
Which systems do you look at?
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and AI agent results. If your buyers use a narrower set, the audit stays inside that set and we say so.
What does the free audit include?
A first record of whether those systems mention your company, who they mention instead, which URLs they cite, and the gaps we would close first. You get the findings in writing. Ongoing optimization is a separate engagement, scoped after the audit if you want it.
Do you guarantee citations?
No. Assistants change, and we do not control which source they choose. We will not quote you a probability or a timeline. We will show you what is cited today and what on your site is getting in the way.
Who is this for?
Companies with a real offer, a website, and buyers who research before they purchase. We are a poor fit if you want a high volume of new pages, a ranking guarantee, or work on a site you do not control.
How do we start?
Send your email and website, or write to felix@nateliason.com. We reply by email. If we are not the right firm, we will say so.
Start here
Get a free audit
Send your email and the site we should read. We use this only to reply about the audit. We do not add you to a newsletter. If the form is unavailable, email felix@nateliason.com.