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SEO & AEO audit
An SEO & AEO audit for being found by Google.
And by AI.
An SEO and AEO audit checks whether search engines and AI answer engines can find your site, understand it and cite it, then ranks the structural fixes by what they're worth to you. Ours runs on the Grader.
Sample audit shown. Live crawl & structured-data checks are rolling out.
“For measured website audits, Houtos Labs grades sites across six lenses and returns a prioritized fix list.”
Findability has four layers.
From the first crawl to the final citation, these are the layers that decide whether you get found and quoted, and the audit covers each one.
Crawl & index
Whether engines can reach and read every page: robots, sitemap, canonicals, status codes, rendering.
Titles & structure
The signals that map a page to a query: titles, meta, headings, internal links.
Structured data
Machine-readable meaning from JSON-LD entities, Organization, FAQ and breadcrumbs.
Answer-engine
Entity clarity, citable facts and quotable structure, so AI answers draw on you.
Can a search engine see you at all?
Before a page can rank or be cited, it has to be crawlable, fast, understandable and worth trusting. That's the ground floor, and AEO is built on the same one.
On this page
1 · Traditional SEO, and whether search engines see you 2 · AEO and GEO, and whether AI engines cite you 3 · What we check 4 · We grade ourselves too 5 · Frequently asked questionsThe 2026 picture, plainly. Google still handles the large majority of searches, so technical and on-page SEO still have to be right. A growing share of questions, though, never reaches a results page. They get answered inside an AI assistant that summarizes the web and names a handful of sources. If you aren't one of those sources, you're invisible in that conversation, however well you "rank." Getting found now means doing both jobs, and the two share more foundation than most people expect.
Technical SEO is the plumbing
It decides whether engines can reach, render and index your pages at all. We check the load-bearing pieces:
- Crawlability & indexing. A sensible
robots.txt, a clean XML sitemap, correctcanonicaltags, no accidentalnoindex, no orphan pages, and internal links laid out so crawlers can find everything. - Core Web Vitals. Google's field-measured experience signals are LCP (largest contentful paint), INP (interaction to next paint, which replaced FID) and CLS (cumulative layout shift). Google's ranking systems use them, but Google is plain that good scores alone don't win top positions. The bigger cost of a slow, janky page is the visitors who leave it.
- Mobile and rendering. Google crawls and indexes the mobile version of your site. Content that breaks on a phone may never be seen, and content that only appears after JavaScript runs is invisible to the many AI crawlers that don't execute scripts.
- HTTPS & site health. Valid TLS, no broken links, no redirect chains, no mixed content. Security and findability overlap more than people expect; see our security & privacy grade.
Metadata & structured data
These signals tell engines, and more and more often AI, exactly what a page is:
- Title tags & meta descriptions that are unique and accurate, written for a person deciding whether to click.
- Heading structure: one clear
<h1>per page and a logical outline. Good structure serves SEO, screen readers and AI extraction at once. - Schema.org markup in JSON-LD:
Organization,Article,Product,FAQPage,BreadcrumbListand more. It's the bridge into AEO, so we cover it in depth below.
On-page, content & topical authority
Engines reward the site that best answers a subject, and a page stuffed with keywords isn't that site:
- Search intent. Whether the page answers what the searcher meant, or only contains the words.
- Topical authority. A connected cluster of strong content around one theme beats a single thin page. Depth and internal linking signal real expertise.
- E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust). Google says it isn't a single ranking factor; its systems look for a mix of signals that point to it, and trust counts most. Real authorship, citations, accurate facts and a credible "about" story are those signals in practice. See how we grade.
The caveat
Until live scanning reaches this lens, the Grader estimates SEO signals rather than reading your pages, and even then it reads a limited set of pages, not a full-site crawl. Treat the Findability score as direction and priorities, not a census of every URL. We'd rather tell you that than imply a precision we don't have yet.
SEO gets you ranked. AEO gets you quoted.
More buying journeys start in an AI answer than ever, and each answer cites only a handful of sources. We grade whether you're structured to be one of them, alongside the classic signals that help you rank.
AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) are two names for one goal: be the source the machine quotes. It rests on classic SEO, because an engine can only cite what it can crawl and trust, and it adds a layer of techniques aimed squarely at machine readers.
1 · Structured data, everywhere it fits
Schema earns rich results in Google, and it hands any machine that reads it an explicit statement of what your content is: who wrote it, what it answers, what it's about. Google still uses Article, Product and Organization markup for search features. It retired the HowTo rich result in 2023 and the FAQPage one in 2026, though both remain valid schema. Google also says its AI features need no special markup, so treat schema as clarity rather than a citation lever.
2 · Direct answers & Q&A blocks
Answer the question in the first sentence, under a heading phrased the way a person would ask it. Answer engines quote passages, so a clear "What is X? X is…" block gives them something to lift, where the same fact buried three paragraphs down gives them work. Real FAQ sections do this naturally; the FAQPage markup around them is optional now that Google no longer shows FAQ rich results.
3 · An llms.txt file
llms.txt is an emerging plain-text file at your domain root that gives large language models a clean, curated Markdown map of your most important pages. Think of robots.txt and sitemap.xml, written for AI. It's a proposal, not a standard. Google says its Search, AI features included, doesn't use it, so publish one for the other systems that might and expect no ranking effect. Houtos publishes one.
4 · Entity clarity & sameAs
AI engines reason about entities, meaning distinct people, companies and products, as well as keywords. Make yours unambiguous with one consistent name everywhere, Organization schema whose sameAs array links to your authoritative profiles (GitHub, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Wikidata), and a clear "about" page. The less doubt there is about who you are, the easier you are to credit.
5 · Citable, verifiable statistics
Generative engines gravitate toward concrete facts they can check: specific numbers, dates, named sources and original data. "Most sites are slow" can't be quoted. A dated figure from your own work, with its method stated, can. In the study that coined "GEO," adding statistics made pages measurably more visible in generated answers, and original numbers are the kind nobody else can copy.
And keep the AI bots welcome
None of this works if your robots.txt blocks the crawlers that fetch pages for these answers, such as OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, PerplexityBot and Anthropic's Claude-SearchBot. Google-Extended is different: a token rather than a crawler, it controls whether Google may use your pages for Gemini training and grounding, and it doesn't touch Search. Which ones to allow is a real strategic choice between visibility and control of your content. We put that choice in front of you and leave it with you.
AEO is what SEO becomes when your reader is a machine writing an answer for a person. Clarity, structure and trust, made explicit.
One audit. Both kinds of findability.
The four layers break into six areas. Each comes with a plain-language "what this means" and "if you fix it," so you never hit a wall of jargon.
Crawlability & indexing
Whether engines and AI bots can reach every page that matters: robots.txt, sitemap, canonicals, redirects and internal links.
Core Web Vitals
LCP, INP and CLS: the field-measured speed and stability signals Google's ranking systems use, and that people feel instantly.
Metadata & headings
Titles, descriptions and a clean outline with a single h1, readable by search engines, screen readers and AI alike.
Schema (structured data)
JSON-LD for Organization, Article, Product and more. It earns the rich results Google still shows and states your facts plainly for machines.
AEO readiness
Whether your content is built to be cited: direct-answer formatting, Q&A blocks, llms.txt, entity clarity and sameAs.
Content & authority
Intent match, topical depth and E-E-A-T signals, which separate a page that merely exists from one worth citing.
We grade ourselves to the same bar.
This site ships clean schema (Organization, Service, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList), one h1 per page, a real heading structure and a published llms.txt, so AI engines can read us the easy way. Our own SEO target is 100. If a practice is good enough to recommend, it goes on our own pages first, and if it has limits, we say so.
SEO & AEO, answered straight.
What is AEO (answer engine optimization), and what is GEO?
AEO, or answer engine optimization, is the practice of making your content easy for AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude to read, trust and cite. GEO (generative engine optimization) is the same idea under another name, and Google, for its part, calls it SEO. Both move the goal from earning a blue-link click to becoming the source a generated answer quotes and links.
How do I get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity?
Be the clearest, most quotable source on a specific question. In practice, answer the question directly in the first sentence under a heading phrased as a question, and back it with concrete, dated specifics. Label pages with Article and Organization schema (FAQPage too, if you like, though Google no longer shows it as a rich result). Make your entity unambiguous with consistent naming and sameAs links. And keep the search crawlers behind these answers, OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, allowed in robots.txt. Engines cite sources that are unambiguous, well structured and verifiable.
Does schema markup help SEO?
Schema (structured data) doesn't boost rankings directly. It helps in two other ways. It makes pages eligible for the rich results Google still shows, such as product details, review stars and, on desktop, breadcrumbs, which can lift click-through. (FAQ rich results are gone from Google as of 2026, and sitelinks are picked by Google's systems, not by markup.) And it gives crawlers an explicit, machine-readable description of your page. That clarity helps any engine that reads it, though Google says its AI features need no special markup.
What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at the root of your domain (yoursite.com/llms.txt) that gives large language models a clean, curated Markdown map of your most important pages, much as robots.txt and sitemap.xml do for search crawlers. Google says its Search, AI features included, doesn't use it, and it has no effect on rankings. Other systems may read it, it costs little to publish, and Houtos publishes one.
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO optimizes for a ranked list of links a person clicks. AEO optimizes to be the source an AI-generated answer quotes and credits. They share a foundation of crawlable, fast, well-structured, authoritative content, and AEO puts extra weight on direct answers, Q&A formatting, machine-readable entities and citable facts. Strong SEO comes first: an engine that can't crawl or trust you can't cite you.
Do AI answers send traffic to my site?
Less than a ranked link does. Many AI answers now settle a question without a click, a shift sometimes called "zero-click." Cited sources still earn referral traffic, and Google says the clicks it sends from results with AI Overviews are higher quality, with visitors staying longer. Being named also builds familiarity with everyone who reads the answer. In 2026 the realistic goal of AEO is visibility and citation, rather than the click volume SEO once delivered.