The AEO Audit Checklist: What to Fix First

Introduction

Failed your AEO audit? Don't fix blind. Research first: SWOT your own site with a tool like Ahrefs, check what competitors get cited for, and mine Reddit and Quora for real questions. Then fix in priority order.

You ran a free AEO audit, got a low score, and now you're staring at a dashboard full of warnings. Low visibility. Weak sentiment. Competitors showing up instead of you.

As one business owner put it on Reddit:

"The data's there... but it's not always obvious what to fix first."

That's exactly what this checklist answers. It's the basic AEO checklist in fix order, step by step, with the reasoning from the people who have actually done it.

What your audit actually measured

Most audit failures are fundamentals, not strategy.

When Webflow analyzed 2,000 websites for its AEO Maturity Index, the results looked like a to-do list, not a research paper:

• 62% of companies have broken internal links
• 60% are missing basic SEO metadata
• 54% have updated less than one tenth of their content in the last six months
• 73% are mentioned in fewer than a quarter of the places LLMs cite for their category

Overall maturity landed at 2 out of 5, with Content scoring 1 and Technical scoring 1. Why? Webflow's explanation is worth reading twice:

"One realistic explanation is that fixes have historically required an engineer and a marketer to be in a room together at the same time."

Step 1: Research before you fix

SWOT your own site, your competitors, and the platforms AI actually cites.

The audit told you you're failing. It didn't tell you what winning looks like in your space. Before touching a single page, work through these three:

1. SWOT your own site

Run a technical and on-page audit in a tool like Ahrefs (site audit, broken links, organic keywords). Your strengths are the content already earning visibility, so protect those. Your weaknesses are the gaps from the AEO audit.

This gives you the fix list for the steps ahead.

2. Competitor research

For the questions your customers ask AI, see who actually shows up. Which competitors get cited, which pages of theirs get lifted, and where you're absent.

Your audit score matters less than the gap between you and whoever AI currently recommends.

3. Mine Reddit and Quora for real questions

Michael Huard, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Webflow, on where the questions live:

"Digging through Reddit's various communities and following engaged threads are gold mines for insight into what questions your content can answer."

The threads where people argue about your category are a free, always-current list of the prompts your customers type.

Why these platforms specifically? Because they're where the citations come from. Webflow's maturity model flags that AI systems prioritize "strategic presence on platforms AI systems prioritize such as Reddit, Quora, and YouTube."

And Webflow's AEO team, on their From insight to action webinar, is even more specific about what answer engines value as "authentic human content":

"Think G2, LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube. YouTube is the number one cited domain... across the four big LLMs to date. And they are not crawling your video... what they are crawling is the transcript."

So Step 1's output is simple: a one-page research brief with your site's SWOT, the competitors AI cites instead of you, and a list of real questions from Reddit and Quora. Everything after this is execution on that brief.

Step 2: Fix the technical fundamentals

Broken links, missing metadata, and indexing come first. Everything else builds on them.

If an AI crawler can't read your pages cleanly, nothing else you do matters. Vivian Hoang, Webflow's SEO and AEO lead, is direct about the order of operations: "having that solid SEO foundation in place and having that technical foundation in place is really important."

The basics, pulled from the practitioner checklists making the rounds on Reddit:

1. Set up Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and GA4
2. Generate and submit your XML sitemap
3. Check robots.txt isn't blocking anything important
4. Fix the broken internal links your audit flagged
5. Add the missing page titles and meta descriptions (60% of sites are missing them)
6. Confirm your important pages are indexed
7. Check AI crawlers can access your content

This is also the section that explains most low scores. Fix these and you've already done the work most companies never do.

Step 3: Answer the question, then add FAQs

FAQ content is the fastest AEO win. Test it before anything else.

Kevin Indig, one of the most respected AI search consultants, has seen the same pattern in every study:

"Strong impact shown over and over again; test FAQ first to get a win."

Why do FAQs work so well? Because AI answer engines answer questions. The average LLM prompt is now 23 words long: conversational, specific, and framed as a question.

Pages built around question-based headings and short answers are exactly what those prompts are fishing for.

The format that gets lifted:

• Put the direct answer in the first two sentences. AI pulls quotable blocks, and the best quotable blocks are short. Most Google answer boxes run 54-58 words.
• Match the format to the intent. As Vivian Hoang puts it: "The key here is really to match the format with the intent behind the question." A comparison question gets a table. A how-to gets steps.
• One idea per short paragraph. Dense walls of text bury the answer, and AI skips them.

And if you only had time for one content move, Guy Yalif, Webflow's Chief Evangelist, would tell you to do two things: "answer questions and refresh it."

Step 4: Schema and llms.txt (do them)

Schema and llms.txt are cheap futureproofing. Add them, then move on.

A common audit trap is treating schema markup as the main event. It isn't. Kevin Indig's priority framing again: "Implement schema if you can, but don't make it the top priority; it may lift citations."

Same story for llms.txt, the file that tells AI tools which pages to read: "Have it on your list but lower than schema; it's futureproofing and takes little effort."

Step 4 in practice:

1. Add Article and FAQ schema (including Question and Answer types) to your key pages
2. Publish an llms.txt file with your most important pages
3. Move on. Neither of these is where the win comes from

Step 5: Measure how AI sees you

You can't fix what you can't see. Check your prompts before your scoreboard.

Fay, Senior Product Manager on Webflow's AEO product, puts the measurement problem simply:

"If you can't see how you specifically are showing up, then it's really hard to change anything about that."

The cheap version: ask the answer engines yourself. Run the questions your customers actually ask (logged out, from a fresh session) through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

Log who shows up, whether you're cited, and whether the AI describes you accurately.

Configure an AI traffic report in GA4

While you're at it, wire up the receiving end so you can see what AI sends your way:

1. In GA4 Admin, open Data display > Channel groups, and create a new channel group called "AI traffic"
2. Add a new channel and set the matching rule to the known AI sources: chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com, claude.ai, and any AI referrers you spot in your reports
3. Create a custom "AI traffic sources" segment so you can apply it to any report later
4. Trend sessions over time, broken down by Session source/medium, to see which answer engines actually send visitors, and to which pages

This matters because AI-referred visitors are high-value: LLM visitors convert 23x more than typical SEO traffic (Ahrefs) and are worth 4.4x more (Semrush).

The prompt checks above tell you if you're visible. This report tells you what visibility is worth.

The tooled version, once you outgrow manual checks: dedicated AI-visibility trackers (the AEO audit tools like Profound, Peak, and Webflow Analyze all do some version of this).

Josh Jacobs at Jasper learned this the hard way: after building a system to track prompts at scale, Jasper went from zero to 130 AEO keyword mentions in six months. As he puts it, "You need a clear owner and a defined gap before you touch a single page." Measurement is how you find both.

Step 6: The cadence that keeps it fixed

An AEO audit is a snapshot. Staying cited takes a regular cadence.

The audit data makes this point for you: the median ChatGPT citation references content that is six months old, yet 54% of companies have barely updated anything in that window.

AI strongly prefers fresh content. Stale content is the slow leak that undoes your fixes.

The practitioners who fixed it permanently did it with a system:

• Oyster HR monitors every page six months after publication, and anything showing a 15% month-over-month organic decline gets refreshed immediately
• Alexander Diner, who rebuilt Webflow.com, frames it as: "The website should be treated as a living, breathing thing"
• Guy Yalif sums up the operating loop: "hypothesis → act → measure... mirrors the approach marketers already take in paid media"

Put a recurring calendar item on this. Audit monthly, refresh what AI stops citing. That's the difference between a fixed site and a site that quietly fails its next audit.

What to fix first: the one-table version

Conclusion

This checklist gets you from failing to functional. Getting cited takes the next layer: consistent measurement, ongoing refresh, and the authority-building work that keeps you in the answers.

You can run every step here yourself. What an agency adds is experience and industry connections, which matter when everyone is racing for the same citations. Coherent is a Webflow and AEO agency that starts exactly where your audit ended.

• Request an AEO website audit for your company
• AEO retainers with monthly visibility monitoring

Sources: Webflow AEO Maturity Index (2,000-site study), Webflow's AEO webinar series, and practitioner case studies from Webflow's readiness roundtable. Expert quotes linked to their original videos.