What does an AEO audit actually check? The list we work through

What an audit is for

An audit exists to answer one question: why are the engines not naming you, and what, in order, would change that. If the output is a 40-page PDF with colour-coded scores and no order of work, it was a sales document. The version below is what we actually run. Most of it you can do yourself in an afternoon.

Part 1: identity

Can an engine tell who you are, and is every source saying the same thing?

• Is the business name identical on the website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, trade licence listing and every directory? Including punctuation and "LLC" or "FZ".
• Is the address the one customers visit, and the same everywhere?
• Is the phone number the same everywhere, in the same format?
• Does the website say, in plain text on the homepage, what the business does, for whom, where, and since when?
• Are the founders or senior people named, with titles that match their LinkedIn profiles?
• Does the site carry structured data (schema) for the organisation, and does it agree with the visible text?
• Does typing the business name into each engine return the right business with the right details?

A no on any of these is fixed before anything else. Identity problems cap everything that follows.

Part 2: pages

Can an engine quote your pages, and do they answer anything?

• Does each service page open with a direct answer to "what is this and what does it cost" in the first hundred words?
• Are prices published, even as a starting point?
• Is there a page for each question a customer actually asks, with the question as the title?
• Does every page have one author with a real name and a real profile?
• Do pages have FAQ sections with short, factual answers, marked up as such?
• Are the pages readable without JavaScript? Some crawlers do not run it.
• Is there a sitemap, a robots.txt that allows AI crawlers, and an llms.txt?
• Does every page have a title and description that a crawler could use as the summary?

Part 3: sources

Are you on the pages the engines cite for your category?

• Run the five customer questions in each engine and list every source cited. This is the map.
• For each source: are you on it? Is the listing complete and current? Does it have reviews?
• Google Business Profile: verified, right primary category, recent reviews mentioning services?
• Directories relevant to the category (Clutch and GoodFirms for agencies and software, DHA listings for clinics, Bayut and Property Finder for real estate, and so on): present and complete?
• LinkedIn company page: complete, with the same description as the website, posting at least weekly?
• Any independent article, list or news item that names the business? If none, that is a finding.

Part 4: current visibility

Where you stand today, so there is a baseline to measure against.

• Twenty answers: five customer questions, four engines, logged out, dated screenshots.
• For each: named or not, who was named instead, which sources were cited.
• Which questions are winnable within a month (specific, local, few competitors on the cited sources) and which are a quarter away.

What comes out

A list of fixes in order, each one small enough to do this week, with the first five marked as the ones that unblock the rest. Usually: identity consistency, Google profile, two directory profiles, rewriting the top three service pages, and the first five question pages. Then the weekly log starts and the audit is done.

Our audit package is this list, run by us, with the fixes written out for your team or for us to do. The price is on the pricing page. If you run it yourself first and send us the results, the audit is shorter and so is the invoice.