AEO checker

What answer engine optimization is

Answer engine optimization is the practice of making a page easy for AI answer engines to find, understand and quote when they build a reply. GEO, generative engine optimization, names the same work, and the two terms are used interchangeably.

It is not a replacement for SEO. Google states that the best practices for SEO remain relevant for its AI features, and that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary. An answer engine can only quote a page it can first fetch.

What changes is the unit that competes. A search result ranks a page; an answer engine lifts a passage. So AEO adds two questions to the ones SEO already asks: is each engine's answer crawler allowed in, and can a single paragraph answer its heading without the rest of the page?

Which crawler each answer engine uses

Each engine's answer crawler is a different user agent from its training crawler, and blocking the wrong one shuts you out of the answers by accident. OpenAI states that each setting is independent of the others.

OpenAI says a site can allow OAI-SearchBot in order to appear in search results while disallowing GPTBot, which collects content for training. Anthropic says disabling Claude-SearchBot may reduce a site's visibility in user search results. Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot so a site appears in its results, and says neither of its crawlers collects content for training foundation models.

Google is the exception to the pattern. AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on the ordinary Search index, so the crawler that matters is Googlebot. Google-Extended is a robots.txt token rather than a crawler, and Google describes it as limiting AI training and grounding in some of its other systems.

What an AEO checker can and cannot measure

An AEO checker is limited to what can be read from your page and your site's public files. That covers the inputs each engine documents, not the answers the engines give.

It cannot report how often ChatGPT or Perplexity names you. That would mean running live prompts again and again against answers that shift with the model and the index. Maveriko reports a page as eligible for an engine when it meets that engine's published requirements, and never as cited.

• Crawler access: whether robots.txt admits each engine's answer crawler, read rule by rule.
• Snippet eligibility: noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet, the controls Google names for limiting what Search shows from a page.
• Extractability: whether each section opens with a sentence that answers its heading on its own.
• Structured data: whether the page says what it is in schema.org terms, such as FAQPage for a page of frequently asked questions.
• Entity authority: whether Wikipedia, Wikidata and your own profiles agree on who the brand is.

How to fix a failing AEO check

Access comes before content, because no rewrite counts while a crawler is shut out. Work down the list in order and re-scan after each step, so you can see which change moved the result.

1. Open robots.txt and confirm OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot are allowed, even if you disallow the training crawlers.
2. Check the page head and the X-Robots-Tag response header for noindex, nosnippet and max-snippet, and search the body for a data-nosnippet wrapper.
3. Rewrite the first sentence under each heading so it answers that heading alone, in thirty words or fewer.
4. Mark up a questions section as FAQPage, and keep the marked-up answers identical to the ones readers see.
5. Re-scan the URL and confirm each engine reads as eligible in the report.

How the score is calculated

The score is the result of 38 published checks run against your page as a crawler receives it, each with a fixed weight and a public source.

• SEO Health is 100 points across six categories: indexability and crawlability, on-page elements, content depth and quality, delivery signals, security and trust, and link architecture.
• AI Readiness blends page readiness (60%) with entity authority (40%): how easily a passage can be quoted, and whether AI engines can tell who the brand is.
• Every check, weight and threshold is published on the methodology page.

Frequently asked questions

Is AEO the same as GEO?

For practical purposes, yes. Both names describe making a page easy for AI answer engines to find, understand and quote. Maveriko scores that work as one AI Readiness number, and the checks are the same whichever name you search for.

Can an AEO checker tell me whether ChatGPT cites my site?

No, and no checker that reads your HTML can. It can tell you whether OAI-SearchBot, the crawler OpenAI uses for search, is allowed in, and whether the page is shaped to be quoted. Whether ChatGPT then names you depends on answers that change with every model and query.

Does AEO replace SEO?

No. Google states that the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that there are no additional requirements to appear in them. An answer engine can only quote a page it can fetch, so SEO is the foundation AEO builds on.

Which answer engines does the checker cover?

The report reads crawler access and eligibility for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Each is marked eligible, ruled out or unknown against that engine's published requirements.

Is the AEO checker free?

Yes. Paste any URL to get your SEO and AI Readiness scores, the per-engine eligibility row and your highest-impact fix without signing up. Signing in, also free, unlocks the rest of the fix list.

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