What gets fixed after an AEO audit?

In order

The seven fixes, in the order they are done

The order matters: crawler access first because nothing else counts if the engine cannot read you; content structure next because it is the biggest lever you control; third-party sources started early because they take longest; schema last because it is housekeeping. Each fix on the done-for-you tier is logged with an owner and a date and re-measured the following week.

1. 1

   AI crawler access rules

   robots.txt checked per bot: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and the rest. A blocked crawler means that engine cannot read a word you publish, so this is fixed first, usually a two-line change, then re-tested.

2. 2 · housekeeping

   llms.txt and plain-HTML housekeeping

   An llms.txt that lists your key pages in one place, a clean sitemap, and content served as real HTML rather than rendered only by JavaScript. Quick to do and worth doing once. Few engines honour it yet, so we file it under housekeeping.

3. 3

   Page and content structure so answers are extractable

   This is the biggest lever you control. Each page that should answer a buyer question gets a direct answer in its first sentence, one clear H1, headings that are the questions, plain-text tables for prices and comparisons, and dated facts. Engines quote what they can extract cleanly and skip what they cannot.

4. 4

   Entity and internal linking

   Making it unambiguous who you are: consistent name, location and description across your own pages, an about and facts page engines can cite, disambiguation from namesakes, and internal links that connect the pages answering related questions.

5. 5

   Sources and citation building

   The directories, roundups, comparison posts and forum threads each engine cited instead of you, listed with what to do on each: claim the listing, request inclusion, answer the thread, correct the entry. Third-party mentions move answers more than your own pages do, and take longest, so they start early.

6. 6

   How third-party sites describe you

   Where an engine repeats an old price, a dead product or a rival's claim, we find the page it learned that from and get it corrected, and put the current facts on your own site so the engine has a better source next time it refreshes.

7. 7 · housekeeping

   Schema markup, as housekeeping only

   Organization, FAQPage and Article markup keep your pages tidy and machine-readable and we add them as basic technical housekeeping. Schema is not an AI visibility lever: it does not, on its own, earn a citation, and we will not sell it to you as one.

How the fixes are found and proved: the AEOscore Loop. What an audit-only engagement gives you first: the free AEO score.