AI Search Readiness Audit
Will an AI engine quote your page?
A single-page audit that grades you on the SEO basics every search engine still reads, then asks a local LLM whether your content is the kind of thing Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, and Perplexity would actually quote in an answer.
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Coverage
What we
check
Two pillars: the classical on-page signals every search engine still relies on, and the harder question — how quotable is your content to an answer engine.
- № 01
Foundations
Title tag length and quality, meta description, heading hierarchy (single H1, nested H2/H3), canonical URL, Open Graph and Twitter Card preview tags, and Schema.org JSON-LD structured data. The signals every engine — classical and AI — reads first.
- № 02
Citability
A local LLM reads your page's main content and grades it 0–100 on whether an AI answer engine would quote it: self-contained facts, concrete numbers, plain prose. It picks the single best two-sentence passage you have, or tells you why it couldn't.
Why this matters
SEO didn't die. It split in two.
Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and Perplexity now answer questions directly — the user often never clicks through. Brands that don't show up inside those answers are losing visibility, regardless of where they rank on the classical SERP.
The classical signals still matter — title, meta, schema, structure. They're the table stakes. But the new question is: if an answer engine wanted to quote your page, could it? That's the differentiator most SEO tools don't measure.
Scope
What we don't do.
This audit is single-page, on-page, AI-readiness focused. Explicit non-goals:
- No backlink analysis. Use Ahrefs or SEMrush.
- No keyword research or rank tracking. Different tool.
- No multi-page crawl. Audits the exact URL you paste.
- No Core Web Vitals. Use PageSpeed Insights.
If you need the above, we'll tell you so honestly. We won't pretend a fast on-page audit is a full SEO suite.
Context
GEO, AEO,
generative SEO
You'll see three labels floating around for the same practice: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and AI SEO. They all mean the same thing — optimising your content so AI answer engines actually quote you. The vocabulary hasn't settled yet, so we cover the underlying mechanics rather than chasing a label.
- № 01
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Coined in the 2023 paper out of Princeton and Georgia Tech. Focuses on making your content cite-worthy to large language models that summarise the web. Concrete numbers, clear claims, named sources, dates, and self-contained passages — the things an LLM can lift into an answer without hallucinating context.
- № 02
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
The same idea framed around the consumer-facing engines themselves: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, Claude. The difference is mostly emphasis — AEO tends to focus on conversational queries and structured Q&A formats; GEO tends to focus on the underlying citation mechanics. Either way, the work is the same.
- № 03
Why classical SEO still matters
Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT search both crawl the live web. They use the classical ranking signals to decide which pages to read in the first place — then the citation mechanics decide which pages get quoted. Skip the foundations and you'll never be in the candidate pool.
FAQ
Common
questions
The questions UK SME owners and content marketers ask before they take "optimising for AI search" seriously.
- Q1
What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring web content so AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot — will cite it in their generated responses. It overlaps heavily with classical SEO on the technical side but emphasises self-contained, fact-dense passages over keyword density.
- Q2
How is AEO different from SEO?
Classical SEO optimises for a ranked list of blue links — the goal is the click. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) optimises for being quoted inside the answer itself — the goal is the citation. Most AEO best practice is backwards-compatible with classical SEO; the difference is what you measure afterwards.
- Q3
Does ChatGPT cite websites in its answers?
Yes. ChatGPT's web search mode (now default for most queries) cites sources inline, with clickable links to the underlying pages. Perplexity and Google AI Overviews do the same. The visible URL next to a cited snippet is the currency of AI search — that is what this audit tries to predict for your page.
- Q4
What makes content citable by an LLM?
Self-contained passages that make sense without surrounding context. Specific numbers, named entities, dates, and concrete claims. Clear paragraph structure with a single idea per paragraph. Plain prose over marketing copy. Anything an LLM can lift into a two-sentence quote without hallucinating the missing context.
- Q5
Do I still need a sitemap and schema markup?
Yes. AI answer engines crawl the web with classical crawlers — sitemaps make discovery faster, Schema.org JSON-LD makes the page's content structure machine-readable. Both raise the probability your page lands in the candidate pool that the LLM actually reads. Skipping them is leaving easy citation surface on the table.
- Q6
How is the citability score calculated?
A local large language model (qwen3) reads your page's main content and grades it 0–100 against a rubric covering self-containment, factual density, hedging language, claim specificity, and paragraph cleanliness. It then picks the single most-quotable two-sentence passage on the page, or explains why it could not find one.
Last word
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