AEO checklist

As AI-powered search becomes the default starting point for buyers, brands need to show up with clarity, authority, and answers. This AEO checklist helps you assess where you’re strong and where you still have gaps. Use it to see what’s already dialed in, what needs refinement, and which actions will help you consistently earn visibility in AI-generated results.

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Assess your current search readiness

Goal: Understand how your brand currently shows up across traditional and AI-powered search so you can spot visibility gaps and opportunities to improve.

  • Gather the real questions your customers ask when searching for solutions, evaluating vendors, or trying to solve pain points. Look for patterns from sales calls, support tickets, community forums, SERP features, and search queries.

  • Search the questions from the step above in tools like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini to see what content surfaces, who’s being cited, and where your brand is missing.

    Measuring AEO: How to track, benchmark, and improve your AI search results

  • Review branded queries to ensure AI tools surface accurate, consistent information about your company.

    Inside our AEO strategy: How we’re optimizing for search at Webflow

  • Improve your citation share by looking for pages already driving strong SEO performance and determining whether they’re structured, scannable, and answer-oriented enough for AI extraction.

    AEO from Webflow

  • Assess whether your site is easy for AI systems to crawl, interpret, and extract answers from. This includes page structure, markup, and overall accessibility.

    • Define your AEO strategy

    Goal: Build an AEO framework that aligns with business goals based on target topics, audiences, and intents, then outline a repeatable plan for content optimization and visibility.

  • Focus on areas where your brand provides unique, authoritative expertise.

    Inside our AEO strategy: How we’re optimizing for search at Webflow

  • Organize queries by funnel stage (awareness, consideration, decision) and identify which questions your audience is likely to ask.

    Winning AEO with content

  • Prioritize efforts like participating in relevant online communities, publishing original research and data, and partnering with trusted brands or leaders in your space.

    Winning AEO with authority

  • Establish repeatable auditing and reporting processes for how often, and in what contexts, your brand appears in AI summaries.

    Optimizing for AEO AMA

    • Optimize content for AI engines

    Goal: Structure and write content so it's easy for AI to parse and for humans to read by refining summaries, clarifying sections, reinforcing credibility, and improving semantic relevance.

  • Start each section with a direct answer before expanding with supporting detail.

    Winning AEO with content

  • Lead with the key takeaway in your intro paragraph or first sentence.

    AEO from Webflow

  • Design each subtopic to make sense on its own — use descriptive headers and standalone summaries that AI can cite independently.

    Optimizing for AEO

  • FAQs, lists, bullets, tables, and short paragraphs improve readability for humans and AI extractability.

    Winning AEO with content

  • Highlight expertise with author bios, citations, and original data.

    Winning AEO with authority

  • Use precise, descriptive titles aligned with natural-language queries.

    AEO from Webflow

  • Connect related pages to strengthen topic clusters.

    Technical AEO for AI discovery

    • Establish a strong technical foundation

    Goal: Ensure your content has the technical foundation that AI needs to read, index, and trust your site.

  • Verify that sitemaps, robots.txt, and critical pages allow AI engines to access your content.

    Technical AEO for AI discovery

  • Organize CMS collections and tagging to reinforce topics and relationships for semantic understanding.

    AEO from Webflow

  • Use canonical tags to signal preferred content versions and reduce confusion for AI crawlers.

    Technical AEO for AI discovery

  • Implement structured data so AI engines can understand your content and entities correctly.

    Technical AEO for AI discovery

    • Enhance trust and authority signals

    Goal: Enhance the credibility and expertise cues AI relies on to select authoritative answers, ensuring your brand stands out as a reliable source in AI outputs.

  • Include author bios, credentials, and relevant experience to demonstrate subject matter expertise.

    Winning AEO with authority

  • Publish proprietary insights, reference internal data, or summarize findings from customer stories to provide concrete evidence AI engines can anchor to.

    Winning AEO with content

  • Build credibility through trusted sites that validate your expertise, reinforce your reputation, and appear in your target queries.

    Winning AEO with authority

  • Ensure your company name, description, boilerplate, and key facts are accurate and consistent across directories, press, partners, third-party sites, and public databases.

  • Use visible up-to-date timestamps, regularly refresh high-impact pages, and cite primary sources.

    • Monitor, measure, and iterate

    Goal: Build an ongoing feedback loop to understand where your content appears in AI-driven search to continuously improve.

  • Track brand visibility, share of voice, and LLM-referred traffic and conversions to understand how AI engines surface your content and to establish reporting baselines

    Measuring AEO: How to track, benchmark, and improve your AI search results

  • Set a regular cadence to evaluate and refresh information, headers, content structure, schema, and internal links.

    How we’re optimizing for AI search at Webflow

  • See how AI systems search for related questions and subtopics to build an answer, then use that information to identify content gaps and prioritize where to focus effort.

  • Track major model updates so shifts in AI visibility can be accurately explained in your reporting.

    • Ensure your website is AEO ready. Fill out the form to get full access to the checklist.

    Unlock now

    Unlock the full checklist

    Fill out the form and get access to all 6 sections of the AEO checklist.

    • Assess your current readiness
    • Define your AEO strategy
    • Optimize content for AI Engines
    • Establish a strong technical foundation
    • Enhance trust and authority issues
    • Monitor, measure, iterate
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