Answer Engine Audit
Answer Engine Audit
Answer engine optimisation · Free audit
We put ten real buyer questions about your category to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini — none of them naming you — then count how often each engine reaches for your brand, and who it reaches for instead. Your readability score appears here in seconds, free. The full citation report needs a free business-email account.
Enter your site — the instant readability check runs in seconds. Free, no sign-up.
What changed
A buyer evaluating your category used to type a query, scan a page of results and form their own shortlist. Now they ask an assistant, and the assistant hands back a shortlist already formed. Three names, a sentence each, and a follow-up question. Whoever is not in those three is not in the evaluation.
Answer engines do not rank pages the way a search engine does. They assemble a reply from three things: what the model absorbed during training, what it retrieves live from the web at the moment of asking, and which of those sources it trusts enough to lean on. Your own website influences the first two weakly and the third barely at all — because when a buyer asks who the best vendor is, an engine will not settle the question by quoting the vendor.
That is the gap answer engine optimisation works in. Not keywords and rankings — presence, corroboration and machine legibility, measured by whether you get named.
What this audit measures
Most tools sell you a single number. A single number hides the distinction that matters, so we report the two halves separately — the first in this page within seconds, the second in the emailed report.
Half one — Readability
Pure HTTP, no engine calls, which is why it lands in seconds. It answers whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended can reach your pages and find anything on them.
Half two — Citation
Ten buyer questions about your category, put to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. None of them mention your brand — because a question that names you proves nothing.
A perfect readability score with zero citations is common, and it is the most useful result the audit produces: it tells you the problem is not on your website.
Oogwai media & content
Fixing robots.txt takes an afternoon. Getting named takes presence on the pages an engine reaches for when it is asked to compare vendors — roundups, review platforms, comparison pages, community threads, editorial coverage, transcripts. Almost never the vendor's own homepage.
That is what the Oogwai media and content team works on. The audit is the brief: every run records the exact domains each engine cited for your category, so the target list is evidence from your own market rather than a generic media plan.
We start from the citations in your report. Which twenty domains do ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini actually pull from when someone asks about your category, and which of them already mention your competitors? That list becomes the workplan, and it is re-derived every quarter because the sources move.
Contributed articles, expert commentary and product inclusion in the trade publications and roundups that keep appearing in those citations. We write to the publication's standard and pitch on a real angle — no syndicated filler, which engines discount anyway.
G2, Capterra, Product Hunt, Clutch, TrustRadius and the category directories specific to your market. Profiles completed properly, categories chosen deliberately, and a steady review cadence — engines lean on these because they are structured, current and third-party.
"X vs Y" and "alternatives to X" are the highest-intent questions in any category and the ones engines answer most confidently. We build honest comparison and alternatives pages on your site, and work to get you added to the third-party ones that already exist.
Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow, industry Slack and Discord recaps. Real answers to real threads, disclosed as coming from you. These surfaces get retrieved far more often than their traffic would suggest, and they are where engines go for candid opinion.
YouTube descriptions, chapters and transcripts are indexed text, and so are podcast transcripts. A twelve-minute product walkthrough, transcribed and structured, becomes a retrievable source that answers a question no article on your site covers.
Original data, plain definitions, question-shaped headings, clear attribution and schema markup — written so a model can lift one sentence and credit you for it. This is the only part of the programme that lives on your domain, and on its own it is not enough.
One company name, one description, one set of founding and product facts across every profile, directory and press mention. Inconsistency splits you into two half-known entities, and an engine that is unsure which one you are will name someone it is sure about.
The same ten questions, re-run monthly against all three engines. You see share of answers over time, which competitors gained or lost ground, and which specific placements moved the number — so the programme is judged on citations, not impressions.
How the work runs
Ten category questions across three engines, plus the readability pass. You get the baseline before anything is promised — including the possibility that you are already being named and need less work than you thought.
We turn the cited domains into a ranked target list, weighted by how often each source is quoted, how hard it is to appear on, and whether your competitors are already there.
Editorial, review, comparison, community and video work runs in parallel against that list, alongside the technical fixes the readability half surfaced.
Monthly re-runs of the identical question set. Share of answers is the metric. Where a number does not move, we retire that channel rather than defend it.
Questions
Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is the practice of getting a brand named and cited in the answers that AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity give to buyer questions. It covers two things: making a site legible to AI crawlers, and building the third-party presence those engines draw on when they recommend vendors.
They overlap and they diverge. Both reward clear content and technical hygiene. But search optimisation competes for a position on a results page, while answer engine optimisation competes to be one of three names in a synthesised reply — and that outcome depends far more on what other sites say about you than on what your own site says.
ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini in the standard audit. Perplexity and Copilot are available on the paid programme, where we also test regional variations and buyer personas.
No. Every one of the ten is a question a buyer would ask about your category without knowing you exist. A question that names you tells you only whether the engine has heard of you, which is a much lower bar than being recommended.
The readability score appears on this page in seconds. The full citation report is usually in your inbox within a few minutes, and always within one business day.
Yes. Technical readability issues are usually a short engineering fix, and we hand over the exact changes whether or not you work with us. Citation gaps are the media and content programme described above.
Retrieval-based mentions can shift within weeks of a placement going live, because the engine reads the source at question time. What the model itself has absorbed moves on the training cycle, which is far slower. We report both separately rather than blending them into one flattering number.