A founder typed their company name into Google. First result. Their SEO was working exactly as it should.
Then they opened ChatGPT and typed: "What are the best tools for managing client onboarding for agencies?" Their product had been built precisely for that use case. They had a review on G2, a case study on their site, a decent backlink profile. They expected to see their name.
Instead, they got three competitors they had never heard of, presented confidently as the top recommendations, with no mention of their product at all.
This is the problem AEO is designed to solve. And it is the problem an AEO audit is designed to diagnose.
What AEO is
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation. It is the practice of making your brand, product or content visible and citable within AI-powered search tools: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and the AI Overviews that now appear at the top of Google results.
Traditional SEO is about ranking in a list of links. AEO is about being the answer, or being named as a recommendation, when someone asks an AI assistant a question related to your category.
The two disciplines overlap significantly, good content, strong third-party mentions and clear site structure help with both, but they diverge in important ways. An AI assistant does not rank pages. It synthesises information from what it has learned during training and, in some cases, from real-time retrieval. The criteria for appearing in an AI answer are meaningfully different from the criteria for appearing in a Google search result.
AEO is not a trend. It is a structural shift in how a growing share of buyers discover products, services and information. If your category has any kind of research phase before purchase, some of that research is now happening in AI assistants. And if you are not showing up there, your competitors who are will have a significant advantage.
What an AEO audit examines
An AEO audit is a structured review of how visible and citable your brand is across AI search tools. It looks at why you are or are not appearing in AI-generated answers, and what would need to change for you to show up consistently and accurately.
A thorough AEO audit covers five areas.
1. Brand entity clarity
AI tools work with entities: named things in the world that have a clear, consistent identity. Your company, your product, your founders, your category. The clearer and more consistent your entity definition across the web, the more confidently an AI can refer to you.
The audit examines whether your brand is clearly defined across the sources AI tools draw from: your own website, Wikipedia if relevant, industry directories, press mentions, review platforms and social profiles. Inconsistencies in how your brand name, category and value proposition are described across these sources create ambiguity that makes AI tools less likely to cite you.
2. Content that directly answers questions
AI tools are trained on and retrieve content that answers questions well. If your content is built primarily for SEO, formatted for rankings, keyword-dense and structured around search terms rather than genuine questions, it may perform adequately in traditional search but poorly in AI retrieval.
The audit examines whether your content answers the specific questions your target buyers are asking AI tools. This includes your FAQ pages, your blog content, your product documentation and your comparison pages. Content that gives a clear, direct answer to a specific question is significantly more likely to be cited by an AI assistant than content that hedges, buries the answer or optimises primarily for keyword density.
3. Third-party mentions and citations
AI tools place significant weight on what authoritative third parties say about your brand. Reviews on recognised platforms, mentions in industry publications, analyst coverage, podcast appearances, directory listings and press coverage all contribute to how an AI model understands and evaluates your brand.
The audit maps your third-party citation profile: where you are mentioned, how you are described, whether those descriptions are consistent and positive, and where the significant gaps are. A brand with strong SEO but thin third-party mentions is often invisible in AI search despite ranking well in traditional results.
4. Structured data and technical signals
Schema markup, particularly for organisation, product, FAQ and review schema, helps AI tools understand what your pages are about and what claims they make. The audit checks whether your site is using structured data appropriately and whether technical elements like your knowledge panel, your Google Business Profile and your social profiles are complete and consistent.
5. Accuracy of AI-generated information
Perhaps the most important element: what do AI tools actually say about your brand when asked directly? The audit tests this systematically across multiple tools and query types, checking for inaccuracies, outdated information, missing products or features, incorrect pricing, and misattribution of competitors' characteristics.
Correcting inaccurate AI-generated information about your brand is one of the most urgent and often most overlooked aspects of AEO. An AI tool that confidently tells prospects the wrong thing about your product is actively damaging your sales process, and you may have no idea it is happening.
Why AEO matters more for some businesses than others
AEO is most urgent for businesses where the buyer journey involves a research phase. If your prospects are asking AI assistants questions like "what is the best way to...", "which tool should I use for...", or "who are the leading providers of...", your AEO profile directly affects whether you are in that consideration set.
It is particularly urgent for:
Businesses in a crowded category where brand differentiation matters. If AI tools are recommending your competitors by name and not mentioning you, you are effectively invisible to a growing share of research-mode buyers.
Businesses targeting technically sophisticated buyers. Early adopters and technical decision-makers are disproportionately heavy users of AI assistants for research. If your buyers are developers, product managers, founders or marketing leads, they are very likely using AI tools to research purchases.
Businesses that depend on being found rather than being sought. If you rely on people discovering you through research rather than already knowing your name, AI search visibility is becoming as important as Google visibility.
How an AEO audit differs from an SEO audit
An SEO audit focuses on your website: its technical structure, its content quality, its backlink profile and its on-page optimisation. The question it answers is: why are we not ranking well in Google?
An AEO audit focuses on your presence across the entire information ecosystem that AI tools draw from: your site, third-party sources, review platforms, industry publications and structured data. The question it answers is: why are AI tools not citing us, or citing us incorrectly?
You can have excellent SEO and poor AEO. You can also have decent AEO without having invested heavily in SEO. The two reinforce each other but neither guarantees the other.
If you already have a solid SEO foundation, an AEO audit typically builds on that work and identifies what additional signals are needed to translate that organic authority into AI search visibility. If you do not yet have strong SEO, addressing your content and citation profile will typically improve both simultaneously.
What to do if you suspect an AEO problem
The first step is to test it directly. Open three or four AI tools, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and ask each one the questions your target buyers would ask when researching your category. Ask them to name the leading options. Ask them to compare you to a competitor. Ask them to describe what your company does.
Note what they say. Note what they get wrong. Note whether you appear at all.
If you find significant gaps or inaccuracies, an AEO audit will tell you exactly why you are not showing up and what to do about it. The fixes are usually a combination of content improvements, citation building and structured data work, but the priority order depends heavily on your specific situation and category.
TinyAudits matches founders and businesses with vetted AEO experts who audit your AI search presence and tell you exactly what is holding you back. Describe what you are seeing, whether that is complete absence from AI results, inaccurate information being surfaced about your brand, or competitors appearing where you should, and we will match you with a specialist who sends you a free basic audit, usually within hours.