AEO lite

About AEO lite

AEO Lite is a practical, no-fluff Answer Engine Optimization checker designed for marketers, founders, and SEO professionals. In an era where AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews are becoming primary research tools, traditional SEO is no longer sufficient. AEO Lite solves the critical problem of understanding how "answer-ready" your web pages are for these new answer engines. By simply pasting a URL, the tool runs a focused analysis across six critical categories that determine visibility in AI-generated answers. It provides a clear score out of 100, a detailed breakdown of what's working and what's missing, and a prioritized fix plan with actionable recommendations. Built from real-world AEO projects for SaaS, fintech, and ecommerce teams, it eliminates guesswork and agency dependency, empowering you to benchmark key pages, brief writers and developers effectively, and integrate AEO work seamlessly into your existing SEO roadmap.

Features of AEO lite

Comprehensive 100-Point AEO Score

AEO Lite evaluates your page across six critical, weighted categories to generate a clear overall score. The analysis covers Answer Readiness (25 pts), Schema Essentials (20 pts), Entity & Links (15 pts), FAQ/HowTo Surfaceability (15 pts), Tech Basics (15 pts), and Trust & Author (10 pts). This structured scoring system instantly shows you where you stand and highlights the most impactful areas for improvement, moving beyond vague insights to measurable benchmarks.

Actionable, Prioritized Fix Plan

Beyond just a score, the tool delivers a concrete, tailored fix plan written in language non-technical teams can act on. It clearly distinguishes between what is already working on your page and what essential elements are missing. Recommendations are prioritized to show which fixes will move the needle first, enabling you to allocate resources efficiently and achieve quick wins in your AEO strategy.

Hard-Fail Rule Detection

The checker identifies critical blockers that can completely prevent your content from being processed by answer engines. It automatically detects if a page is blocking LLM crawlers via robots.txt, using a noindex tag, has insufficient content (under 150 words), or lacks any schema markup. Pages with these issues receive a score of 0, providing an urgent and unambiguous signal that fundamental issues must be resolved before any other optimization.

Real-World, Category-Based Analysis

Each scoring category is based on proven factors from actual AEO projects. The tool audits for specific, actionable elements like question-form headers, concise 40-60 word answers, step-by-step instructions, valid JSON-LD schema for FAQPage and HowTo, primary entity alignment, and author visibility. This ensures the analysis is not theoretical but grounded in what actually influences AI Overviews and modern answer engines.

Use Cases of AEO lite

Benchmarking Key Landing and Product Pages

Marketers and founders can use AEO Lite to quickly audit their most important revenue-driving pages. By getting an instant AEO score and breakdown, they can establish a performance baseline, understand their competitive vulnerability in AI search landscapes, and make data-driven decisions about where to focus their optimization efforts for maximum impact.

Briefing Content Writers and Developers

SEO managers and team leads can leverage the tool's concrete output to create clear, unambiguous briefs. The detailed fix plan provides specific instructions for writers on required content structures (e.g., question headers, answer length) and for developers on necessary schema implementations (e.g., FAQPage, HowTo), streamlining collaboration and ensuring technical and content changes align with AEO best practices.

Prioritizing AEO within SEO Roadmaps

For teams with established SEO workflows, AEO Lite provides the clarity needed to integrate answer engine optimization without derailing existing priorities. The prioritized recommendations allow SEOs to identify high-impact, low-effort AEO tasks that can be slotted into upcoming sprints, ensuring a balanced approach that covers both traditional search and emerging AI-driven discovery.

Conducting Competitive Content Analysis

Users can analyze competitor URLs to reverse-engineer their AEO strategy. By understanding the schema markup, content structure, and entity signals that contribute to a competitor's high score, you can identify gaps in your own approach and uncover optimization opportunities they may have missed, turning competitive intelligence into a strategic advantage.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the scoring buckets and what do they mean?

The AEO score is out of 100 points, divided across six weighted categories. Answer Readiness (25 pts) evaluates on-page content like question headers and concise answers. Schema Essentials (20 pts) checks for valid JSON-LD markup. Entity & Links (15 pts) looks at topic authority and citations. FAQ/HowTo Surfaceability (15 pts) assesses visible structured content. Tech Basics (15 pts) covers indexability and crawlability. Trust & Author (10 pts) verifies author and date signals. Each category's contribution shows you the specific strengths and weaknesses of your page.

How do AI Overviews and answer engines work?

AI Overviews and answer engines (like those in ChatGPT or Perplexity) use large language models to synthesize answers from across the web. They prioritize content that is easy to parse, verify, and cite. This means they heavily rely on clear page structure, authoritative signals, and especially structured data (schema) to understand, trust, and extract information from your page for inclusion in their generated responses.

What schema coverage do I need for answer engines?

Critical schema types include FAQPage for question-answer pairs, HowTo for instructional content, Article for blog posts and articles, Organization to establish site authority, and BreadcrumbList for site hierarchy context. Properly implemented JSON-LD schema acts as a direct guide for AI crawlers, dramatically increasing the likelihood your content is understood and selected as a source.

How are the tool's recommendations generated?

Recommendations are generated automatically based on the analysis of your page against the six scoring categories. The tool identifies specific, missing elements that are known to influence answer engine visibility, such as a missing HowTo schema or a lack of question-form H2 headers. The fix plan is prioritized, often highlighting technical blockers first, to provide a clear, actionable path to a higher score.