What Is an AEO Checker? (Free AI Visibility Check)

The short version: an AEO checker is a tool that tells you whether AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews can reach, read, and cite your website. You enter your URL, it runs a set of machine checks, and it hands you a score plus the specific things to fix. We run a free one that gives you a topline score in about 20 seconds, no signup for the number itself. You can check your site now. The rest of this page is the plain-language answer to every question people ask before they do.

What is an AEO checker, exactly?

AEO stands for answer engine optimisation, the work of getting your business named and cited inside AI answers rather than only ranked in blue links. An AEO checker is the diagnostic for that work. It fetches your page the way an AI crawler would and grades the things that decide whether an engine can use you as a source: is your content in the raw HTML or hidden behind JavaScript, does your site load fast enough that a crawler does not give up, is there structured data describing your business, are you blocking the bots that feed AI training, and so on.

Think of it as a readiness test. It does not tell you that AI already recommends you. It tells you whether AI can even consider you, which is the floor you have to clear first.

Who is an AEO checker for?

Any business that wants to be found when a customer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation. That includes local service businesses, professional practices, e-commerce stores, and B2B companies. If you have a website and your buyers are starting to ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for advice before they decide, an AEO check tells you whether you are even in the running.

It is most useful if you already get real traffic and want to protect it as search shifts, or if you have done SEO and want to know what AEO adds on top. If you are brand new with no site and no reviews, a checker will mostly tell you to go build the fundamentals first, which is a fair and useful answer.

What does an AEO checker cost?

A good topline check should be free. Ours is: you enter your URL and get your score on the 20-Point AEO Readiness Test in about 20 seconds, with no signup for that number. The full per-criterion breakdown and the fix list are delivered by email, also free.

Paid AEO tools exist too, and they are a different job. Most paid products are trackers, which monitor your AI citations over time across engines, and they run from roughly a hundred to several hundred dollars a month. A checker grades a page once; a tracker watches your visibility month over month. We compare the landscape in our guide to the best AEO checker tools, free options included.

How long does an AEO check take?

The automated part is fast, about 20 seconds for a topline score, because the checks are machine-run against your live page. Reading and acting on the results is the real work. The fixes range from a five-minute robots.txt change to a few days of template and schema work, depending on what the check surfaces.

What does an AEO checker actually measure?

Our checker runs a 20-Point AEO Readiness Test, eight criteria split into two groups. One group is the technical table stakes most sites pass by default: AI crawler access, server-side rendered content, and fast response times. The other group is the deliberate work most sites skip: Organization schema, FAQPage schema, off-page entity presence, and clean, answer-first structure.

That split is the whole story, and we have the data to show it. When we ran this exact test against 50 funded Toronto startups for our Toronto Startup Website Audit 2026, the median score was 10.75 out of 20. About 95% of the points companies earned came from framework defaults, while only 29% came from deliberate schema and content work. Only 5% of those sites had FAQ schema, and 52% were missing Organization schema entirely. The gap between what a site passes by accident and what it has to do on purpose is where almost all the opportunity sits.

How do you read your score?

Treat the number as a floor, not a grade. A high score means an engine can crawl, read, and parse you cleanly. It does not mean an engine will choose you. We have audited sites that scored well on readiness and still earned almost no citations, because being retrievable and being recommended are different things.

So read the score in two passes. First, clear the technical failures, since none of the rest matters if a crawler cannot get a clean read of your page. Then look at the deliberate criteria, the schema and the answer-first structure, because that is what separates a site that can be cited from one that actually is. For the fix-by-fix walkthrough, see how to check your AEO score and what to fix.

The catch worth knowing before you start

A checker measures readiness, and readiness is not visibility. It is the necessary first step, not the finish line. Once your page can be read and parsed, whether an engine actually names you depends on signals that mostly live off your page: reviews, trusted mentions, directory presence, and genuine entity depth across the web.

This matters because it stops you from over-trusting a good score. A clean readiness result is permission to compete, and the real competition is decided by the off-page work. If you want to measure that side, a checker is the snapshot and a tracker is the film: see how to track your AEO and AI citations over time.

How to check if AI can find you, right now

• Run the free check. Enter your URL in our free AEO checker and get your topline score in about 20 seconds, benchmarked against funded Toronto startups.
• Clear the technical failures first. Make sure your content is in the HTML, your response time is fast, and you are not blocking AI crawlers by accident.
• Do the deliberate work. Add Organization and FAQPage schema, and restructure your key pages to lead with the answer, since that is where most sites leave points on the table.
• Then measure the thing that pays, citations. A readiness score gets you considered; tracking tells you whether engines actually name you, and on which questions.

If you would rather we run the check, read the results, and do the work for you, that is what our SEO and AEO service covers.

FAQ

What is an AEO checker? An AEO checker is a tool that grades whether AI answer engines can reach, read, and cite your website. It fetches your page like an AI crawler, checks things like crawler access, server-side rendering, response speed, and structured data, and returns a score plus a fix list. It measures readiness, not whether AI already recommends you.

Is there a free AEO checker? Yes. Ours gives you a topline score on the 20-Point AEO Readiness Test in about 20 seconds with no signup for the number, and the full breakdown and fix list by email, also free. You can run it on your own site at /aeo-checker. Paid AEO tools exist too, but most of those are trackers that monitor citations over time, which is a different job from a one-time check.

What does a good AEO score mean? It means an engine can crawl, read, and parse your site cleanly, which is the floor you must clear to be cited at all. It does not guarantee citations. In our testing, sites that scored well on readiness still earned few citations, because being retrievable and being recommended are decided by different signals, most of them off your page.

How long does an AEO check take? The automated score takes about 20 seconds because the checks run against your live page. Acting on the results is the real work and ranges from a quick robots.txt fix to a few days of schema and template changes, depending on what the check finds.

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