What Does an AEO Audit Include, and What Does It Cost?

Linda Orr

6 days ago

2 min read

An AEO audit, short for answer engine optimization audit, checks whether AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can find your company, understand what you do, and trust you enough to recommend you. A useful audit covers your technical setup, your content, your authority and outside mentions, and the buyer questions you should be answering, and it ends with a prioritized plan. Prices range from free automated reports to several thousand dollars. My SEO and AEO audit with a 90-day roadmap starts at $7,500.

1. What is the difference between an AEO audit and an SEO audit?

They overlap a lot, because AI tools lean on many of the same signals search engines use. The difference is emphasis. An AEO audit pays more attention to whether your pages answer questions directly, whether your company is described consistently across the web, how much trusted outside sources say about you, and whether structured data makes your business, services and people easy to read. A good audit today covers both.

2. What should a real AEO audit include?

In my audits, which I lead with my team, the review covers:

Technical setup: crawlability, indexing, speed, structured data, and whether AI crawlers can read your pages.
Content: what to keep, fix, merge, remove and expand, and whether your pages answer buyer questions plainly.
Authority and trust: reviews, directories, press, and other outside signals that influence rankings and AI citations.
Demand: a keyword and question map focused on buyer intent.
Plan: a prioritized 90-day roadmap with the highest-return actions first, plus a KPI and tracking plan so you can measure revenue impact.

3. Why do prices vary so much?

Automated tools will scan your site and produce a report for free or a few hundred dollars. Those reports can catch technical issues, but they can't judge whether your positioning is clear, which outside sources matter in your industry, or what to do first. A full audit takes days of work by people who know both search and marketing, and it should end with a plan your team can execute.

4. Does an AEO audit include AI visibility tracking?

Not as a score. Tracking tools test a handful of prompts, and small wording changes or a different model can change the answer. I wrote more about that in Are AI Visibility Trackers Worth Paying For? An audit focuses on the foundations you control, and then sets up practical measures, such as asking leads how they found you and watching referral traffic from AI tools.

5. What happens after the audit?

You get the findings and the 90-day roadmap. You can carry it out in-house, hand it to your current agency, or have my team implement it. If you want ongoing help, my SEO and AEO program starts at $4,000 a month, with my team doing the day-to-day work and me setting the strategy and reviewing the results.