CheckAEO
Free AEO score checker for AI answer engines
I run CheckAEO, a free tool that scores how readable your site is to AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude). It's grown to ~1,000 unique visitors a day, and I've now got scan data on thousands of domains. A few things surprised me.
1. "Ranking on Google" and "getting cited by AI" are diverging fast. Plenty of sites that rank fine in traditional search score terribly for machine-readability, no clear structure, answers buried in fluff, nothing an LLM can lift cleanly. The reverse is true too. We're heading into a world where you can win one and lose the other.
2. The honest version of AEO is less sexy than the pitch. Everyone selling "AEO tools" implies they can tell you whether AI will cite you. They can't, and neither can I. What I can measure is whether your content is machine-readable -- structured, extractable, unambiguous. That's a precondition for being cited, not a guarantee. I decided to say that out loud on the site rather than overpromise. Weirdly, being honest about the limits has been good for trust.
3. The boring structural stuff matters most. Clear headings, direct answers near the top, semantic markup, no critical info trapped in images or JS. Not glamorous. Hugely predictive.
I built the whole thing solo on Cloudflare, kept the core scan free with no signup, and I'm figuring out monetization as I go (whole-site scanning is the paid tier).
Curious what this community thinks: is AEO a real durable category, or a temporary gold rush before the AI platforms standardize and kill the need for tools like mine? Genuinely unsure, and the answer changes what I build next.
1 Comment
The interesting opportunity isn't measuring AI readability—it's becoming the source businesses trust to understand how AI systems consume their content as those systems evolve. I'd keep validating whether customers buy CheckAEO because of today's optimization advice or because they need an enduring way to adapt as AI discovery keeps changing.