The 56-Point AEO + SEO Audit Checklist
The same 56-point framework we run for paid audits. Twelve categories. Pass, Partial, or Fail thresholds on every check. Work it line by line and find the issues costing you traffic and AI citations.
- 56 specific checks across 12 categories. Crawlability, URL structure, on-page SEO, schema, Core Web Vitals, social and Open Graph, mobile, content quality, opportunity mining, AI search and GEO, local SEO, and migration-specific.
- Deterministic Pass, Partial, or Fail rules. Each check has a clear threshold so two people running the same audit land on the same answer. No vibes-based scoring.
- Severity tags on every check. Critical, High, Medium, Low. Know which findings move the needle and which can wait.
- Built for AI search, not just Google. Five dedicated AI Search and GEO checks for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, on top of the classic SEO surface area.
- Local SEO and migration-specific blocks. Skip them when they don't apply. Work them hard when they do.
- The same framework we use ourselves. Identical checks, scoring, and severity logic our team applies to every paid Content Cucumber audit.
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SEO, AEO, and GEO are the same audit.
The SEO, AEO, GEO acronym fight is a distraction.
SEO became AEO became GEO. The names change every few quarters, but the work stays the same. Crawlable, cited, fast, accurate, and structured. Every framework that ranks pages also wins citations. One checklist covers both because it is the same job.
AI search reads the same signals Google reads.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews crawl your HTML, parse your schema, and weigh the same authority signals search engines have used for years. Clean robots.txt. Valid JSON-LD. Real authors. Hard numbers in your content. The work you do for SEO also earns you AI visibility.
The cost of skipping a basic check is silent.
A noindex tag on a template. A broken robots.txt. A stale sitemap. Each one removes pages from search and AI results. There is no alert. There is a slow drift down the rankings that is easy to blame on the algorithm. The checklist surfaces the silent killers first.
You can run this yourself before anyone touches your site.
Pass, Partial, and Fail thresholds are deterministic. No agency required to interpret them. Two people working through the checklist on the same site land on the same answers. Use it as a self-audit before hiring anyone, or as a sanity check on a vendor's report.