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The AEO Report is a comprehensive audit of your brand’s Answer Engine Optimization readiness — the degree to which your web presence is structured, authoritative, and legible to AI-powered answer engines like Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and ChatGPT’s browsing mode. A single AEO Report run produces diagnostic scores, a schema validation breakdown, a root-cause analysis, and a prioritized action plan — all in one report you can share as a PDF.
Running an AEO Report costs 50 credits. This reflects the depth of the audit — the report crawls your site, validates all structured data, analyzes content coverage, and generates a full executive summary with recommendations.

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What the AEO Report audits

The AEO Report covers four diagnostic areas:

Structured data coverage

The percentage of your key pages that include valid schema.org markup. Low structured coverage means AI engines can’t reliably extract facts about your brand from your pages.

Unstructured content coverage

The percentage of your content that answers the kinds of questions AI models are commonly asked in your category — measured against the intent patterns CogNerd has mapped for your industry.

Optimization opportunities

Specific, ranked improvements you can make — adding missing schema types, publishing content for uncovered intents, fixing broken structured data, or improving entity clarity.

AEO readiness score

A 0–100 composite score summarizing your overall answer engine readiness. This is separate from your AI Visibility Score — it measures potential rather than current performance.

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Run an AEO Report

1

Open the AEO Report page

Navigate to Dashboard → Diagnostics.
2

Confirm your brand and website

Verify that your brand profile is up to date. The audit crawls your website, so the URL in your brand profile must be accurate and publicly accessible.
3

Click Run audit

Click Run AEO Report. The audit runs asynchronously. Most reports complete in 5–10 minutes depending on your site’s size.
4

Review the report

When the audit finishes, the full report loads in the dashboard. Work through each diagnostic section in order — starting with schema validation, then unstructured coverage gaps, then the action plan.
5

Export as PDF

Click Export PDF to download a formatted version of the report, suitable for sharing with your marketing team, developer, or an agency.

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Reading the diagnostics

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Structured data coverage

This section shows the percentage of your audited pages that have valid, complete schema.org markup. CogNerd checks for the most impactful schema types for AI answer engines:
  • Organization — your brand as a named entity
  • WebSite — your site with search action
  • WebPage — individual page metadata
  • Article / BlogPosting — your content pages
  • FAQPage — frequently asked questions
  • Product / Service — if applicable to your brand
Each schema type is evaluated against three statuses:
StatusMeaning
ValidPresent and correctly structured. AI engines can read and use it.
IncorrectPresent but contains errors — missing required fields, wrong data types, or malformed JSON. AI engines may ignore or misread it.
MissingNot present on pages where it should be. AI engines have no structured signal for that page type.
Fix incorrect schema first — it is faster to repair existing markup than to add new schema from scratch, and incorrect schema can actively confuse AI engines, which is worse than having none.

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Unstructured content coverage

Unstructured coverage measures whether your published content answers the questions AI engines receive about your category. CogNerd compares your content library against an intent map of the most common queries in your industry and calculates what percentage you currently cover. A low unstructured coverage percentage means AI models frequently receive questions your content doesn’t answer — so they either skip your brand or give an incomplete answer. Use Content Studio to fill these gaps systematically.

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Optimization opportunities

The optimization opportunities list is ranked by estimated impact on your AEO readiness score. Each item includes:
  • Issue — what is missing or incorrect
  • Affected pages — which URLs are impacted
  • Estimated impact — the projected increase in your AEO readiness score if fixed
  • Recommended action — the specific step to resolve it
Work through this list top-to-bottom for maximum efficiency. Items at the top have the highest return on effort.

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AEO readiness score

Your AEO readiness score is a 0–100 composite that accounts for structured coverage, unstructured coverage, schema validity, and entity clarity. It represents your ceiling — how visible you could become if AI engines can fully read and understand your brand. Your AI Visibility Score (from Brand Monitor) represents your current actual performance. The gap between your AEO readiness score and your AI Visibility Score indicates how much latent potential you have. A high readiness score with a low visibility score means your structure is good but your content or citation authority needs work.

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Executive summary

Every AEO Report includes an executive summary at the top of the report. The summary is written in plain language and covers three areas:
  1. Surface issues — the most visible problems affecting your AI answer engine presence, described without technical jargon
  2. Root causes — the underlying reasons those issues exist (e.g., “Your organization schema is missing a sameAs property, which prevents AI engines from confidently linking your brand to your social profiles”)
  3. Action plan — a prioritized sequence of steps, from quick wins to longer-term structural improvements
The executive summary is designed to be readable by a non-technical stakeholder — share it directly from the PDF export when briefing a marketing director or external agency.
Use the executive summary’s action plan as your optimization roadmap for the next quarter. Re-run the AEO Report after completing the top-priority items to measure your readiness score improvement.

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Export and share

Click Export PDF to download the full AEO Report as a formatted PDF. The PDF includes:
  • Your AEO readiness score and all diagnostic scores
  • The schema validation breakdown with affected URLs
  • The full optimization opportunities list
  • The executive summary with action plan
The AI Visibility Score (from Brand Monitor) measures your current performance — how often and how well AI platforms actually mention your brand today. The AEO readiness score measures your structural potential — how well your website is set up to support strong AI visibility. You need both: a high readiness score means the infrastructure is in place; a high visibility score means AI models are actually using it.
Run a baseline report immediately, then re-run after completing a significant batch of improvements — deploying new GEO Assets, adding schema to key pages, or publishing a round of Content Studio articles. Quarterly re-runs are a reasonable cadence for most brands.
Yes. The PDF export is a standalone document with no login required. Share it with developers, agencies, or internal stakeholders freely.
Entity clarity measures how unambiguously AI models can identify your brand as a distinct named entity. Brands with generic names, no verified social profiles in their schema, or conflicting descriptions across pages score lower on entity clarity. Fixing your organization.jsonld and ensuring consistent brand naming across your site improves this component.
Schema.org markup can be syntactically valid JSON-LD but still be semantically incorrect for AI engine use — for example, using the wrong @type, omitting recommended properties, or referencing URLs that return 404s. CogNerd validates against AI engine best practices, which are stricter than the minimum schema.org specification.
The AEO Report audit crawls your live website. If your site is behind a login, a staging environment, or a Cloudflare challenge page, the crawl will fail or return incomplete data. Ensure your production domain is publicly accessible before running the audit.