The AEO Checklist: 27 Checks to Get Your Answers Cited

What an AEO checklist is for

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the work of making a single passage on your page good enough that an engine reuses it as the answer. An AEO checklist keeps that work concrete: instead of "write better content", you get a list of checks you can run against any page in about fifteen minutes.

Use the checklist below page by page. Anything you cannot tick is a task, and the sections are ordered so the cheapest wins come first.

1. Access: can answer engines read you at all?

• robots.txt allows the crawlers you want visibility in — Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended.
• The page returns 200 and is not blocked by a noindex tag or an x-robots-tag header.
• Primary copy exists in the server-rendered HTML, not only after JavaScript runs.
• The page is in your sitemap.xml and the sitemap is referenced from robots.txt.
• No login, interstitial or cookie wall sits between the crawler and the answer.

If any of these five fail, nothing further on this list matters yet.

2. Question research: are you answering the real phrasing?

• You collected questions from People Also Ask, autocomplete, site search logs, sales calls and support tickets.
• Questions are grouped by intent: definition, comparison, procedure, troubleshooting, pricing.
• Each group has one page that owns it — no two pages targeting the same question.
• You included conversational variants: "how do I", "is it worth", "what happens if", "how much does it cost to".

3. Answer-first formatting

• An H2 states the question in the wording people actually use.
• A 40 to 60 word self-contained answer sits immediately below that heading, with no preamble.
• The answer is factually complete without the surrounding paragraphs.
• Detail, caveats and examples follow the answer rather than delaying it.
• One idea per paragraph, with the claim in the first sentence.

This is the highest-yield AEO edit most sites can make, and it is usually a ten-minute change per page.

4. Structure a machine can extract

• Exactly one H1, and a heading outline that reads like a table of contents.
• Procedures are numbered steps, never prose.
• Specification and pricing comparisons are real HTML tables.
• Terminology uses definition-style lists.
• Sections run roughly 100 to 200 words so a retriever can lift one cleanly.

5. Schema that clarifies what is already visible

• FAQPage on genuine question-and-answer blocks only.
• HowTo on procedures, with each step matching the visible numbered step.
• Article with a real, named author and both published and modified dates.
• Organization and WebSite on every page.
• LocalBusiness with name, address, phone, hours and service area matching your Google Business Profile exactly.
• Every block validates in the Rich Results Test, and marks up visible content only.

6. Trust signals the engine can weigh

• Author bios show credentials relevant to the topic.
• Publish and update dates are visible to a human, not just in markup.
• Claims are sourced and linked to the primary source.
• Your own site, review platforms and industry roundups describe you the same way.

7. Delivery

• The page is fast on mobile and passes Core Web Vitals.
• The main answer is reachable within two clicks of the homepage.
• Internal links use descriptive anchors, not "click here".

How to run this every month

Pick your twenty highest-intent pages. Score each against the 27 checks, log the failures, and fix access and formatting issues first — they are the ones that flip a page from invisible to citable. Then re-run the same twenty next month so you are comparing like with like.

AEO, SEO and GEO in one workflow

AEO overlaps almost entirely with good SEO in the fundamentals, and it feeds GEO directly: a page with a clean, quotable answer is exactly what a generative engine retrieves. Run one checklist across all three rather than maintaining three strategies.