Answers · AEO & AI Search
What is an AEO score and how is it calculated?
Last reviewed: · Strategic AI Architects Data Desk · reviewed by Mike Moore
An AEO score is a numeric rating of how ready a page or website is to be found, read, and cited by AI answer engines — and because no engine publishes a citation formula, every AEO score is a tool-specific methodology, not an industry standard. Any honest description of "how it's calculated" is therefore a description of one implementation's choices.
The qualifier cuts both ways: the absence of a standard doesn't mean the scores are arbitrary. A defensible AEO score checks conditions the engines themselves document — Google's AI-features guidance requires a page to be indexed and snippet-eligible, OpenAI and Perplexity both document that their search crawlers must be allowed for a site to be surfaced — plus the structural qualities that make a passage safely quotable by a language model. What separates a serious score from a marketing widget is whether each check traces back to a published source or a stated observation.
How our own implementation calculates it
Our audit scores five categories, weighted equally toward a 100-point composite. It is one implementation among several on the market; we publish the categories so the score is arguable rather than oracular:
| Category | What it measures | Why an engine cares |
|---|---|---|
| Content | Depth, specificity, and answer-first structure — does the page state complete answers, with real numbers, near the top? | Models cite passages they can quote without reconstruction; thin or buried answers lose to direct ones. |
| Q&A | Whether content is organized around the questions people actually ask, including FAQ sections phrased as real queries | AI answers are question-shaped; question-shaped source material maps onto them with the least inference. |
| E-E-A-T | Identifiable authorship, credentials, first-hand experience signals, dated review lines, named sources for claims | Engines weight source credibility, and Google's quality guidance is built around experience, expertise, authority, and trust. |
| Schema | JSON-LD structured data: Article/WebPage with an organization author, FAQPage, and Dataset markup where data is cited | Structured data is the machine-readable statement of what the page is, who wrote it, and when it changed. |
| Technical | Crawlability (AI crawlers not blocked), indexability, page speed, mobile rendering, clean HTML the parsers can extract | A page a crawler can't fetch or parse cannot be cited at all — this category gates the other four. |
The gating point deserves emphasis: Technical failures zero out everything else. A site that blocks the AI crawlers in robots.txt or a WAF rule is invisible to the answer layer no matter how good the content is — and our own study of 1,080 insurance agency websites found a median mobile PageSpeed score of 61, which is why Technical is a full fifth of the composite rather than a footnote.
Treat any AEO score — ours included — as a readiness diagnostic, not a ranking. It measures the conditions you control; the engines' selection layer stays theirs.
The Content and Q&A categories are also the two that change most by line of business, since the questions worth answering differ: Medicare and health, life, and commercial each have their own guide.
Sources
- Strategic AI Architects. Free AEO Audit — the five-category methodology (Content, Q&A, E-E-A-T, Schema, Technical) described on the live audit page. Verified live 2026-08-18. strategicaiarchitects.com/audit.
- Google Search Central. "AI features and your website" — indexed-and-snippet-eligible requirement, no special markup needed. Verified live 2026-08-18. developers.google.com.
- OpenAI. "Bots" documentation — OAI-SearchBot and site surfacing in ChatGPT search. Verified live 2026-08-18. platform.openai.com.
- Perplexity. "Perplexity crawlers" — PerplexityBot and appearance in Perplexity results. Verified live 2026-08-18. docs.perplexity.ai.
- Strategic AI Architects. "We Ran PageSpeed on 1,080 Insurance Agency Websites," original research, August 2026. strategicaiarchitects.com.
Related questions
Is there an official AEO score, the way PageSpeed has an official Lighthouse score?
No. Page speed has a reference implementation — Google publishes Lighthouse, so every tool measuring performance measures the same thing. Nothing equivalent exists for AI citation readiness: no engine publishes a scoring formula, so every AEO score on the market is a proxy built by a vendor from what the engines' documentation and observed behavior suggest matters. That doesn't make the scores useless; it means you should judge a score by whether its methodology is published and whether each check traces to something an engine actually said.
What is a good AEO score?
On our 100-point audit, the pattern matters more than the number: a site strong on Content and Q&A but missing Schema and Technical basics has cheap wins available, while the reverse — perfect markup wrapped around thin content — is the harder fix, because structure can't compensate for having nothing quotable. Most insurance agency sites we audit fail on multiple categories at once; our tracking-pixel and page-speed studies of 1,000+ agency sites both found the industry baseline is low.
Can a high AEO score guarantee AI citations?
No, and any tool promising that is overreaching. The engines choose citations per-query, per-conversation, and they don't publish the selection formula. A readiness score measures the conditions you control — retrievability, structure, evidence of expertise — which raise the probability of citation. The proof is sampling: ask the engines real customer questions and see who they cite.
Want to know where your own site stands? Run the free Audit — a live AEO audit plus a HIPAA tracking scan — or browse all answers.