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OpenAEO FAQ. How the audit works

These are the ten questions people ask most before running an OpenAEO audit, which of the four assistants it tests, exactly what the five retrieval gates are, whether you need a developer to fix anything, how long until you get cited, and how often to re-audit. OpenAEO is an answer-engine-optimization tool: its instant audit scores your site against those gates and 8 headline checks, then hands you the files and copy that get you named by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, while your dashboard tracks those results over time, alongside crawler reachability and citation tests. Every answer below is written to be lifted straight into an AI response: short, specific, and self-contained, with the concrete number or definition an assistant needs rather than a paragraph of corporate throat-clearing. For the one-paragraph version of AEO itself, see the glossary; for what it costs, see pricing.

The five retrieval gates, in order

  1. Content is present in raw HTML (not JavaScript-only rendering).
  2. AI bots receive HTTP 200 at the edge, no CDN or WAF challenge.
  3. robots.txt does not disallow the AI search crawlers.
  4. The site is indexed where assistants read it (Google and Bing).
  5. No unresolved placeholder markers remain in visible page text.

Everything else people ask

Which AI assistants and crawlers does OpenAEO test?+
OpenAEO sends a request as each live AI crawler and records the HTTP status it got back: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot (Claude), PerplexityBot, Googlebot (AI Overviews), Bingbot (Copilot), and Applebot. That is 8 real fetches, because robots.txt is a request and a CDN is an enforcer: a site can allow ClaudeBot and still answer it 403, and editing robots.txt will not fix a 403. Google-Extended is the exception. It is a robots.txt token telling Google whether it may use your content for Gemini, and no crawler identifies as it, so we read it from robots.txt rather than inventing a user agent for it.
What exactly are the five retrieval gates?+
They are the failures that cap your score no matter what else is good: content that only renders after JavaScript, AI bots blocked at the CDN or WAF, a robots.txt disallow, not being in the index assistants read, and unresolved placeholder markers in live copy. A gate failure means the page cannot be cited, so it limits the total.
What does an OpenAEO audit not cover?+
It optimizes AI chat search: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot. It is not a traditional keyword rank tracker, not a paid-ads tool, and not a voice-assistant or shopping-feed optimizer. Off-site consensus is scored, 24 of the rubric's 100 points, but nothing we generate can move it: those points are earned on other people's platforms, so we measure them and leave the earning to you.
Is any of my site data stored when I run an audit?+
The free audit reads your public HTML the way a crawler does. It does not touch your analytics, require a login, or store page contents. Paid plans keep your score history and citation results so you can see trends over time.
How often should I re-audit my site?+
Re-audit whenever you ship a redesign, change your CMS or CDN, or update key pages, and on a quarterly cadence otherwise. Business plans crawl weekly automatically and alert you when a gate regresses or a competitor takes a citation slot.
Can OpenAEO write the fixes for me, or just find them?+
The free tier hands you the exact files and rewritten copy to paste. Business outputs fixes as tickets a developer can ship. On Enterprise we implement the changes and verify them on every deploy.
What's the difference between AEO and GEO?+
They describe the same goal. Answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) both mean structuring a site so an AI assistant can read it, trust it, and cite it. OpenAEO uses AEO; the checks are identical either way.
Why did my score drop after a redesign?+
Most redesigns move rendering to client-side JavaScript, which trips Gate 1, or ship a new robots.txt that inherits a bot disallow. A single inherited line can hide a whole site from AI crawlers. Re-audit right after any relaunch.
Do AI citations actually bring traffic?+
Yes, and OpenAEO measures it. We segment AI-referral traffic from chatgpt.com, claude.ai, perplexity.ai and Copilot, and pair the score with a same-day citation baseline so you can see whether being cited turns into visits.
What happens on the Business and Enterprise plans?+
Business is $39 per month for five sites: weekly crawls, 12 prompts across all six surfaces (adding Copilot and Google AI Mode), a schema generator, drift alerts, and dev-ready tickets. Enterprise adds unlimited sites, SSO and roles, an API, a check on every deploy, and a dedicated strategist. See pricing.

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