How to run an AEO audit on your site

A 90-minute audit covering citation share, prompt coverage, technical AEO blockers, and revenue capture. The exact checklist Lantern runs for new accounts.

Updated 2026-04-20 · How-to guide · ~7 min read

An AEO audit is not an SEO audit with 'AI' in the title. The dimensions that matter are different — citation presence in target prompts, schema completeness for AI extraction, content freshness signals, and (the part most audits skip) revenue capture wiring. Here's the 90-minute version that covers all four.

Required tools

  • An AEO monitoring tool for engine queries (or 90 minutes of manual checking)
  • View access to your site's robots.txt and source HTML
  • A schema validator (validator.schema.org or Google Rich Results Test)
  • Optional: Lantern, which runs this entire audit during onboarding and outputs the 1-page action plan

The steps

1

Section 1 (15 min): Define your prompt universe — the 50–150 queries that matter

List every query a target buyer might ask an AI engine to find a vendor in your category. Include category-level ('best AEO tools'), comparison-level ('Lantern vs Profound'), use-case ('how to track ChatGPT in HubSpot'), and brand+ ('Lantern reviews'). Your audit's quality is bounded by this list.

2

Section 2 (20 min): Check current citation presence across all four major engines

For each prompt × engine (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini), record: are you cited (yes/no), what position, what URL. Manual checking takes ~10 seconds per prompt × engine; 50 prompts × 4 engines = 33 minutes. AEO monitoring tools (Lantern, Profound, etc.) automate this.

3

Section 3 (15 min): Audit your top 20 cited pages for AEO-extractable content

For each cited page, check: (a) is the answer to the prompt in the first 200 words, (b) is there a clear H2 question + answer pair, (c) is FAQ schema present and valid, (d) is the modified-date in the last 90 days. Missing any of these caps your AEO citation share.

4

Section 4 (10 min): Check robots.txt and llms.txt for AI crawler access

Ensure your robots.txt allows GPTBot, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended (Gemini), Bingbot. Check for an llms.txt file at root. Many sites accidentally block GPTBot via overzealous robots rules — you'd be invisible to ChatGPT entirely.

5

Section 5 (15 min): Audit revenue capture — does your site convert AI traffic?

Open your top 5 AEO-cited pages. Is there a clear CTA above the fold? Is the form short (3 fields max for a content download)? Does the page have UTM-aware tracking that fires before HubSpot? If any answer is no, your AEO traffic is leaking.

6

Section 6 (10 min): Audit competitor citation share for the same prompts

For 10 of your most-important prompts, list which competitor brands are cited above you and how often. This is the share-of-voice baseline. Track it monthly. Material changes (a competitor doubling their citation share) are early signals of a content investment you should respond to.

7

Section 7 (5 min): Compile the audit findings into a 1-page action plan

Structure: (a) baseline citation share, (b) top 5 missing prompts you should be cited on, (c) top 5 cited pages that need AEO refresh, (d) any technical blockers (robots, schema), (e) revenue-capture fixes. Three priorities, ranked. Don't ship a 40-page audit no one reads.

Common mistakes

  • Running an 'AEO audit' that's actually an SEO audit with 'AI' in the headers — different dimensions, different priorities, different tools.
  • Skipping revenue-capture audit (Section 5) — citation share is meaningless if your site doesn't convert the traffic.
  • Treating it as a one-time event — AEO landscape shifts monthly. Re-audit quarterly minimum.
  • Auditing only ChatGPT — Perplexity and Gemini have different citation logic; you'll miss optimization opportunities.

Where this fits in the AEO pipeline attribution stack

The steps above are one link in a longer chain. In order: you pick prompts to monitor, you track AI-referred sessions, you tag contacts in your CRM, you roll attribution up to the Deal object, you report pipeline dollars to the CFO. If you skip any link, the chain breaks and the number you quote to finance can't be defended in an audit.

If you're still evaluating which tool to run this workflow on, Lantern's AEO tool comparison hub has honest head-to-head pages for Profound, Scrunch, Peec AI, AthenaHQ, and HubSpot's own AEO product — scored on the dimensions that matter for a CMO buyer (CRM integration depth, reporting quality, prompt-scaling economics).

If you're about to walk this work into a budget review, the CFO's Guide to AEO Budget Defense has the memo template, the five-slide deck structure, the attribution-math cheat sheet, and the three most-common CFO objections with counter-arguments. It's the long-form companion to this how-to and was written for the renewal conversation specifically.

The operational rhythm that works: run the steps above once to set up, then review the output monthly in a 15-minute standing meeting with your Head of Growth and RevOps lead. Quarterly, re-audit your prompt list, your content backlog, and your attribution lookback window. Annual: present the full-year AEO ROI trend to the board. That cadence is what separates teams who ship an AEO dashboard once from teams who run AEO as an ongoing budget-defensible channel.

FAQ

Common questions.

How often should I run an AEO audit?
Quarterly minimum, monthly if you're investing actively. Citation positions shift weekly as engines re-index, and competitor citation share moves on a 30–90 day cadence. An annual audit is too infrequent for a category this fast-moving.
Can an agency run this for me?
Yes — most major SEO agencies now offer AEO audit services. Cost is typically $3–10K. Compare against AEO tools like Lantern ($99–$499/mo) which run continuous audits — the tool wins on cost and recency, the agency wins on strategic interpretation.
What's the most common audit finding?
Across the Lantern customer base: 60%+ of audits find that the company is cited well in 5–10 prompts but invisible in 30–50 high-intent prompts they don't know about. The actionable finding is the prompts you didn't know you should be ranking on.
Do I need an AEO audit if I already have good SEO?
Yes — strong SEO correlates with strong AEO presence on category-level prompts but not on long-tail comparison or use-case prompts. The latter is where AEO ROI compounds.

Lantern ships this as a monthly report.

Instead of hand-wiring the steps above, Lantern installs the HubSpot properties, the JS snippet, and the pipeline attribution workflow in under 30 minutes — then ships the monthly ROI report your CFO signs off on. $99/mo Starter or Enterprise. 14-day free trial.

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