How to Check Your AEO Score: What an AEO Checker Measures and What to Fix

The short version:

• An AEO checker tells you whether AI engines can do three things with your site: reach it, read it without running JavaScript, and find a clean answer worth citing. It is not a keyword tool. It is a machine-readability test.
• A "good" score is less about a number and more about which stage you fail. A site can look perfect to a human and score near zero because a crawler sees a blank page.
• When we audited 50 funded Toronto startups on a 20-point version of this test, the median score was 10.75 out of 20. Most sites pass the easy access checks and fail the deliberate ones: schema and answer-first structure.
• You can run the whole thing on your own site in about two minutes with our free AEO checker, then fix in the order the failures actually matter.

We built our checker because owners kept asking us a fair question we could not answer by eyeballing a homepage: "can AI actually see my site?" Your browser runs JavaScript and loads everything, so your site always looks fine to you. The machine's view is different, and that difference is usually where the problem hides. Here is what the check measures and how to read the result.

How do I check my AEO score?

Run your site through a purpose-built AEO checker rather than guessing from your Google ranking. A checker fetches your page the way an AI crawler does, tests whether your content survives without JavaScript, verifies that you allow the AI crawlers and are indexed where they look, and scans for the schema and answer-first structure AI engines reward. You get a list of specific gaps, not a vanity number.

The reason a dedicated tool matters is that none of this shows up in a normal browser or a classic SEO audit. You cannot see your own robots rules, your CDN's bot handling, or your no-JavaScript render without deliberately testing for them. That is the whole job of the checker: show you the machine's view of your site, which is the only view that decides whether you get cited.

What does an AEO checker actually measure?

It measures reachability, readability, and citability, in that order. Reachability is whether AI crawlers are allowed in at all. Readability is whether your core content exists in the raw HTML. Citability is whether a model can find a direct answer plus the machine-readable facts to trust it. A failure early in that chain makes everything after it irrelevant.

Concretely, a solid checker looks at:

• Crawler access. Does robots.txt allow the search crawlers, and does your CDN actually let them through? For ChatGPT specifically that means OAI-SearchBot, its live search crawler, which is a different bot from GPTBot (training) and ChatGPT-User (pages a user asks it to fetch).
• Index presence. ChatGPT Search runs on Bing's crawling infrastructure alongside OpenAI's own index, so being absent from Bing can make you absent from ChatGPT.
• No-JavaScript render. Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript. If your homepage is blank with JavaScript off, the crawler sees a blank page.
• Structure and schema. An answer-first passage plus Organization and FAQPage schema, so the model can lift a clean answer and confirm who you are.

That list is the same shape as the 20-point test behind our own checker, which is worth naming so the score is not a black box.

What is a good AEO score?

There is no universal pass mark, but the honest benchmark is this: most sites are not close, so clearing the structural checks already puts you ahead. In our audit of 50 funded Toronto startups, the median score was 10.75 out of 20, and 95% of the points sites did earn came from platform defaults rather than deliberate work.

That last number is the one worth sitting with. Sites score points automatically for things their hosting handles, then stall the moment the work requires intent. In the same audit, roughly 90% allowed AI crawlers and 93% rendered without JavaScript, but only 5% published FAQ schema, 52% were missing basic Organization schema, and just 30% passed a plain answer-first test on their homepage. So a "good" score is not about chasing 20 out of 20. It is about closing the deliberate gaps that almost everyone leaves open.

How do I test whether AI can actually see my website?

The fastest manual test takes thirty seconds: turn off JavaScript in your browser settings and reload your homepage. If the page is blank or shows only a spinner, that is exactly what most AI crawlers see, and nothing else matters until you fix it. If it renders fine, your likely gaps move to crawler access and schema.

We like this test because it is brutal and free, and it reframes the whole problem for people who assumed AI visibility was about clever content. You can have the best copy in your category and still be a white screen to the machine. Beyond the render, the other two manual checks are reading your robots.txt for the AI crawlers by name and searching Bing for your business to confirm you are in the index that feeds ChatGPT. A checker just does all three at once and adds the schema scan.

Is there a free AEO checker?

Yes. Ours is free, it needs no signup, and it returns the specific gaps rather than a score you cannot act on. Point it at your homepage and it fetches the page like a crawler, tests the no-JavaScript render, checks OAI-SearchBot access and Bing presence, and scans for the schema and answer-first structure that decide citations.

Run it here: the Stratezik AEO checker. We publish it free for the same reason we publish our monthly AI citation tracker and our ChatGPT ads index: we would rather earn trust by showing the work than by asking you to take our word for how AI search behaves.

Is an AEO checker different from a traditional SEO audit?

Yes, and the difference is the whole point. An SEO audit grades your site for a human scanning a page of ranked links: titles, keywords, backlinks, Core Web Vitals. An AEO checker grades it for a machine that fetches, parses, and quotes one passage. The two overlap on site health, but AEO adds requirements classic SEO never tested, like rendering without JavaScript and carrying machine-readable structure.

The practical consequence trips up a lot of well-optimised sites. You can rank respectably on Google and still score poorly on an AEO check, because the AI failed at the fetch or parse step long before ranking ever entered the picture. We wrote the full comparison in AEO vs SEO: what changes, but the short version is that your Google rank does not carry over. Check it separately.

What should I fix first after I check?

Fix in failure order: reach, then read, then trust. There is no point adding schema to a page no crawler can fetch, and no point writing answer-first copy a crawler renders as blank. Work the list top down and stop overthinking the parts you have already passed.

Here is the order we work in with clients:

1. Open crawler access. Allow OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and CCBot in robots.txt, and confirm your CDN is not blocking them at the network layer.
2. Get into Bing. Register in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your URLs; it is free, takes about ten minutes, and still feeds ChatGPT's search.
3. Fix the render. If your homepage is blank without JavaScript, get your core content into the raw HTML. This is the one item that can be a real engineering job rather than an afternoon.
4. Add an answer-first block plus schema. One direct paragraph that states who you serve and where, plus Organization and FAQPage schema.

For the full version of this list, with the reasoning behind each gate, see our AEO checklist.

Do I need an AEO agency, or can I check and fix it myself?

For most sites, you can check and fix it yourself. The scan is free, and six of the common gaps are an afternoon of template and schema work rather than a project. An agency earns its keep in one case: when your site is fully client-rendered and getting content into the raw HTML is a genuine engineering effort, or when you want ongoing measurement of whether AI engines actually start naming you.

That is the honest scope we give Toronto businesses who ask whether "getting AI ready" is a big job. Usually it is not. Run the checker first so you are fixing measured gaps rather than paying anyone to guess, and only bring in help for the render problem or for the tracking. The businesses winning AI answers right now are not the ones who spent the most. They are the ones a machine could read, and you can find out which one you are in about two minutes.

Sources

1. Stratezik Toronto Startup Website Audit 2026: 50 funded Toronto and GTA startups scored on a machine-verified 20-point AEO test (median 10.75 of 20; 95% of earned points from defaults; roughly 90% allow AI crawlers, 93% render without JavaScript, 5% FAQPage schema, 52% missing Organization schema, 30% pass answer-first). Dataset available on request.
2. OpenAI crawler roles, OAI-SearchBot (live search) versus GPTBot (training) versus ChatGPT-User (user-requested fetches), and the recommendation to allow OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search visibility: Presenc AI, "OAI-SearchBot vs GPTBot"; SoRank, "OpenAI Crawlers Explained for 2026".
3. ChatGPT Search running on Bing's crawling infrastructure alongside OpenAI's own index: Yoast, "What is ChatGPT Search".
4. Stratezik Toronto AI Citation Tracker, August 2026: monthly measurement of which AI engines name Toronto businesses. Available at stratezik.com/blog/toronto-ai-citation-tracker-august-2026.

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About Stratezik: Stratezik is a Toronto-based marketing agency that runs on its own AI agent system. We specialise in AEO-first content strategy, founder-led brand building, and full-funnel paid media for startups and local businesses. We publish our data and our tools for free because we would rather earn trust by showing the work.

Contact: dave@stratezik.com

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