Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) makes your content the quoted answer inside AI chatbots and Google’s AI Overviews. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) measures your share-of-voice across those AI answers. AEO Checker helps you optimise for both.
1. What Is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?
Traditional SEO tries to rank blue links.
AEO focuses on being the answer, the featured snippet, knowledge-panel paragraph or chatbot citation a user sees before they click.
Why now? Around 60 % of Google searches in 2024 ended with zero clicks (SparkToro). Users get answers right on the SERP or inside ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
How to win? Craft content machines can lift: 40-word definitions, FAQ schema and clean semantic HTML.
2. What Is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?
| Layer | Question it asks |
|---|---|
| Retrieval | Are AI models aware of your brand? |
| Generation | When they answer, do they name-drop you or competitors? |
| Optimisation | What can you tweak so future answers prefer you? |
Coined in 2023 as chat-based engines exploded, GEO zooms out from a single page to share-of-voice across millions of prompts.
3. Where AEO Checker Fits In
| Step | What you do | What we do |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Enter your URL | Paste any public page. | Crawl HTML, fetch schema & headings. |
| 2. Get personalised insights | Wait ≈ 10 s. | Score four pillars: Answerability, Knowledge-Base, Structured Data, AI Accessibility. |
| 3. Improve your strategy | Apply the checklist. | Re-score on demand to track your AEO / GEO lift. |
Behind the scenes AEO Checker:
- Queries ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini with niche prompts to see if, how & why they cite you.
- Extracts entities to reveal which competitors steal citations.
- Audits semantic tags (
<header>,<section>,<ul>), FAQ/HowTo schema,robots.txt,sitemap.xml, and optional AI files (llms.txt). - Compiles everything into a shareable dashboard — no sign-up needed for the free scan.
4. Example with Zara.com on June 16th 2025
| Metric | Score | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Overall AEO Score | 78.2 / 100 | “Very good”, Zara is often cited but some technical gaps remain. |
| AI Presence | 100 | ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini all flag Zara as a top fashion brand. |
| Competitor Landscape | 90 | H&M & Uniqlo appear alongside Zara due to heavy competition. |
| Answerability | 45 | Long paragraphs; break key answers into 40-60-word blocks. |
| Knowledge Base | 100 | Wikipedia & Wikidata entries found which is strong E-E-A-T signal. |
| Structured Data | 18 | Only generic Article / Review; missing FAQ & Product. |
| AI Crawler Accessibility | 15 | No llms.txt; robots.txt blocks some docs. |
Suggestions for Zara
- ✅ Split “About Us” into Q-A pairs and add FAQ schema.
- ✅ Publish
llms.txtlinking to plain-text product pages. - ✅ Add a 50-word “fast fashion” definition atop the sustainability page (Gemini cited H&M because Zara’s was buried).
- ✅ Unblock
/press/*inrobots.txt; ChatGPT cites Uniqlo press releases, not Zara’s.
5. Why Start With AEO Checker?
- Zero friction — no credit card, no account, instant score.
- Actionable — each metric maps to a concrete fix (add schema, shorten answer, unblock crawlers).
- Future-proof — one audit covers AEO and GEO; scale to enterprise monitoring when you’re ready.
“Clear, authoritative passages still win Google’s AI Overviews.” — John Mueller, Google Search Advocate
Ready to See Your Score?
Paste your link into aeochecker.ai and get a full AEO + GEO health report in a few seconds for free.