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AEO audit checklist: can your page be cited?

checklist // , 6 min read, by Darthwares

An AEO audit checks three things in order: can answer engines reach the page, is the page eligible to be shown, and does it contain a passage worth quoting. Work through them in that order, because a brilliant answer on a page that crawlers cannot fetch will never be cited. The first two groups below come from platform documentation. The third is editorial judgment, and we label it as such.

A stopwatch beside a grid of dots filling in and a small coin
On this page // 4 sections
  1. 011. Access: can the engines reach the page?
  2. 022. Eligibility: can the page be shown?
  3. 033. Content: is there something worth quoting?
  4. 04Run it across the whole site, then repeat
Illustration with sample values.

1. Access: can the engines reach the page?

Access problems are the cheapest to fix and the most damaging to miss.

  • robots.txt allows the search crawlers you care about: Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot.
  • No firewall, CDN or bot-protection rule returns a challenge or an error to those user agents.
  • The page returns a 200 status, not a redirect chain or a soft error page.
  • The main content is present in the HTML response, not only after client-side JavaScript runs.
  • The page is linked from other pages on the site, so a crawler can discover it.

2. Eligibility: can the page be shown?

Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that no other technical requirements apply.

  • The page has no accidental noindex directive in its meta tags or response headers.
  • It is not restricted by nosnippet, data-nosnippet or a very small max-snippet value, all of which limit what can be quoted.
  • The canonical URL points to the page itself, or deliberately to the version you want shown.
  • The page appears as indexed in Search Console's URL inspection.
  • Any structured data matches the text that is visible on the page.

3. Content: is there something worth quoting?

No platform publishes rules for which passages are cited. These checks are our rubric for a page that answers well.

  • The title says what the page is about, and the content delivers on it.
  • The question implied by the title is answered directly in the opening lines.
  • At least one passage makes sense when read alone, without the surrounding paragraphs.
  • Headings describe what each section answers.
  • Claims are specific, with numbers, names and dates, and link to a source where one exists.
  • The page covers the topic in enough depth to be useful, not a few thin lines around a call to action.

Run it across the whole site, then repeat

A checklist works for one page. Sites fail in aggregate: a strong homepage alongside dozens of thin or duplicated routes, or a template change that drops a canonical from every article at once. Audit every reachable URL, sort by the weakest pages, and fix access and eligibility problems before polishing prose.

This is what dotmap automates. It crawls the site, runs eighteen technical checks per page, and has a model judge each page on twelve dimensions, including whether the answer comes first and whether a passage could be quoted. Re-run it after each release and compare. A passing audit means a page is ready to be cited; whether it is cited is decided by the answer engine, and you confirm that separately by checking real prompts.

Primary sources and further reading

Prepared with AI-assisted drafting and checked against the primary sources below. These sources support the platform and measurement claims; the examples and recommendations are dotmap analysis, not results reported by the sources.