AEO Site Audit
Thursday, September 3, 2026
What it is
A new audit inside HubSpot's Answer Engine Optimization tool that scans your site and surfaces the content and technical issues most likely to keep your brand out of AI answers in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It runs across two dimensions - content quality and technical health - and returns a prioritized list of recommendations.
Why it matters
As buyers shift toward AI-generated answers, a brand that is not optimized for those engines is invisible at the moment someone asks a relevant question. Most teams have no way to diagnose why. This names three specific gaps: pages missing the depth, structure or coverage AI engines look for when choosing citations; technical problems like missing structured data, poor canonicalization or slow loads that suppress discoverability without any obvious alert; and the absence of any signal about what to fix first.
The Take
Chris Carolan
Just because we're out there and we're being seen does not mean we're creating any value.
Chris asked for this one, which surprised the room - he is usually the least interested person on the call when AEO comes up. The audit scans your site across two dimensions, content quality and technical health, and returns a prioritized list rather than a pile of findings.
It did not survive first contact. The Visit AEO button went nowhere live on air, and the audit could not be found by navigating into the AEO section directly. Consider that reported, product team.
The substantive objection is about what a citation actually is. A citation means an AI used your content to produce an answer. It does not mean it recommended you. That makes "own domain citation rate versus competitors" a close cousin of the impression - a number that moves without necessarily meaning anything, since almost nobody clicks through to see which sources produced the answer they already have.
The counter-question from the room was whether AEO is even a separate discipline. The three pain points this addresses - content gaps, undetected technical issues, no prioritization - are the same three anyone has been having in SEO conversations for a decade, right down to the Google knowledge box, which was also a thing you won while possibly losing the visit. And ChatGPT and Anthropic are not search engines; a lot of what reads as AEO may still be Google's infrastructure underneath.
The technical gap is real though: there is no Search Console equivalent. No place to hand your sitemap to an AI company and ask to be crawled. What the AI age did solve is the grunt work - titles, descriptions, meta tags, alt text no longer need a developer. Which leaves an uncomfortable question the segment ended on: are we now structuring sites so a machine can cite them rather than so a human can use them?
The advice that closed it was not a tactic. Build a fantastic product, build a culture where the people on the team are valued, then do remarkable, conversation-worthy things. None of that is hackable, and it is the same work that has always worked.
Watch Us Discuss This
The full segment from the show, us working through this update start to finish.
Produced by Value-First Media