See your site the way AI agents see it
What is answer engine optimization?
Answer engine optimization is the practice of making a website readable, quotable and transactable by AI agents rather than only by search crawlers. It covers whether retrieval crawlers can fetch your pages, whether your content survives without JavaScript, whether a passage can be lifted out as a standalone answer, and whether a shopping agent can find your catalogue and complete a purchase.
Can Perplexity, ChatGPT and Gemini (Google grounding) retrieve you — and do they cite you when a buyer asks?
Can an agent find your machine-readable surfaces — markdown twins, well-known discovery, an MCP endpoint?
Can a shopping agent read your catalogue and check out, against the ACP and UCP feed specifications?
Five pillars, one weighted grade
- RetrievabilityDo robots.txt and your CDN admit 16 AI crawlers? 7 are fetched live.30%
- ParseabilityHow much survives without JavaScript, which no AI crawler runs.25%
- AnswerabilityCan a passage be lifted out and used as the answer?20%
- Entity and trustDoes your schema resolve to a real organisation, author and date?15%
- Agent readinessMarkdown twins, well-known discovery, MCP and product feeds.10%
Discovery is moving from search results to answers
Buyers increasingly ask an assistant instead of scanning results. When they do search, an AI answer now sits above the links. A page an AI crawler cannot read is absent from both.
| Month | Users |
|---|---|
| Nov 2023 | 100M |
| Aug 2024 | 200M |
| Feb 2025 | 400M |
| Oct 2025 | 800M |
| Year | Share |
|---|---|
| 2019 | 50.3% |
| 2024 | 58.5% |
| Condition | Clicks (index) |
|---|---|
| No AI Overview | 100 |
| AI Overview shown | 65.5 |
| Year | Volume (index) |
|---|---|
| 2024 | 100 |
| 2026 (forecast) | 75 |
- Ads in AI Overviews (US)
- Google: AI Overviews monetising at about Search’s rate
- ChatGPT ads test (US): labelled Sponsored, below the answer
- ChatGPT ads in the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea
Where 100 buying journeys are decided, at your assumption
25 of 100 journeys are decided where only a crawlable, citable page exists; 44 more end in search without a click. Only 31 reach a page at all.
Your assumption (the slider) × one published rate: 58.5% of searches end without a click (SparkToro/Datos, 2024). Not a forecast — a way to see the stakes.What people ask before they run it
Is there a free AEO checker for my site?
Yes. This one runs 48 checks and queries 3 answer engines at no cost, on a free Prompeteer account. The report is yours to share, download and act on.
How do I make my blog visible to ChatGPT?
Serve the post body in the raw HTML and keep dateModified honest. Give every post a named author resolved in your schema graph, and open robots.txt to retrieval crawlers, not only training ones.
Do AI crawlers run JavaScript?
No major one does. Vercel and MERJ found no JavaScript execution across 500 million GPTBot fetches, and the same held for ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. Googlebot remains the only major crawler that renders.
Does llms.txt help?
There is no evidence that it does. Google states it has no effect on Search, and no engine has confirmed reading it. We report whether you have one and weight it at zero rather than inflating your score with it.