AEO Checker
Paste a page and this checker grades every section on one question: could an answer engine lift your opening sentence and have it still make sense? Everything runs in your browser.
An AEO checker tests whether your page is built to be the answer rather than just a result. This one grades each section's opening sentence for self-containment, length, and anything that blocks a clean quote, based on a named study of what AI engines actually cited. It reports structure, never a promise of rankings.
Paste full HTML (View Source, then copy) for per-section grading. Plain text is graded as one section.
Runs locally in your browser. Nothing is uploaded or stored.
Fix these first
Section by section
Each row grades the opening sentence under that heading. Click a row to see it.
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Opening sentence
Clean. This opening could be quoted as-is.
structural section(s) skipped (FAQ, sources, takeaways): those are not answer capsules.
Reference, not a target: the study behind these checks defined an answer capsule as roughly to characters. There is no documented ideal length.
Plain text, ready to paste into a doc or a ticket.
The free AI Search Visibility Audit asks this question of your key pages, plus four more, answered by me rather than a script. Nothing here guarantees a citation.
What it is
A free, rule-based answer engine optimization checker that runs entirely in your browser. It splits a page into sections and grades the opening sentence of each one the way an engine looking for a quotable answer would.
What it does
Finds each section's answer capsule. Flags openings that start with "it" or "this" and cannot stand alone, warm-up filler before the answer, links inside the answer, and sentences too thin or too long to quote. Counts question-phrased headings.
What it isn't
Not a citation predictor and not a rank tracker. It cannot see whether ChatGPT quotes you, cannot measure authority, and gives no score out of 100. Passing every check removes reasons to skip you. It does not earn trust.
How the answer capsule checker grades a section
The answer capsule checker reads the first sentence under each H2 or H3 and asks whether an engine could quote it with nothing else from the page. A section counts as liftable only when none of the first three checks below fails.
- It points back or warms up. The sentence opens with a word like "It" or "This", refers to "as mentioned above", or spends its first words on filler such as "When it comes to" or "In this article".
- It is a fragment or a paragraph. Under 25 characters reads as a non-answer ("It depends."); over 300 characters tends to get paraphrased rather than quoted.
- It carries a link. A link inside the first sentence is flagged; links later in the same paragraph are fine.
- Notes that never fail a section. An opening under 80 characters gets a nudge to check it answers on its own, and an H2 that is not phrased as a question is noted, because question headings match how people search.
Sections headed FAQ, sources, references, further reading, key takeaways, table of contents, or related are skipped, because they are page furniture rather than answers.
Answer engine optimization is not a new discipline. It is the old discipline of answering the question first, enforced by machines that quote you instead of linking to you.
The reasoning behind this tool
Every check here traces to one named study of what AI engines actually quoted. How to get cited by ChatGPT breaks down that research, including the 72.4 percent answer-capsule finding and why links inside an answer correlate with fewer referrals. If you are still working out how SEO, AEO, and GEO fit together, start with entity-based search explained, which covers the whole picture in plain English.
Frequently asked questions
- What is an AEO checker?
- An AEO checker tests whether a page is built to be the answer, not just a result. This one reads each section and grades its opening sentence: is it self-contained, is it short enough to quote, and does anything get in the way of an engine lifting it cleanly.
- What is an answer capsule?
- A short, self-contained answer placed directly after the title or a question-style heading. In an audit of 15 domains published by Search Engine Land in November 2025, 72.4 percent of blog posts cited by ChatGPT included an identifiable answer capsule, the strongest commonality the audit found among cited posts.
- Why does this flag links in my opening sentence?
- In that same study, about 91 percent of cited answer capsules contained no links at all, and links inside them correlated with fewer referrals. A clean sentence is easier to quote verbatim. Keep links in the paragraphs that follow.
- Is there an ideal answer length?
- No documented ideal exists. The study defined a capsule as roughly 120 to 150 characters, a range it took from the snippet lengths LLMs extract in comparable studies, and this tool shows that range as a reference, not a target. The band it checks is deliberately wide: too thin to be an answer, or too long to quote.
- Does a good score mean I will get cited?
- No. Nothing guarantees a citation, because the engine chooses. These are structure checks based on one named study of what AI engines quoted. They remove reasons to skip you; they cannot manufacture authority or trust.
- Does this AEO checker store my content?
- No. It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded, logged, or stored on any server, and the page makes no network requests while it works. Close the tab and the text is gone.
Disclaimer
This is an experimental, educational tool provided as-is, with no warranty. It uses transparent, rule-based pattern matching, not machine learning, not any search engine's systems, and not any third-party API. Its checks are modeled on a single published audit of content that AI engines cited, which measured correlation rather than cause, so passing every check is not a promise of a citation, a ranking, or traffic. Sentence and section detection can misread unusual markup, non-English text, or heavily templated pages. All processing happens locally in your browser; the content you paste is never transmitted to, or stored on, this server. For a human read on your actual pages, request a free audit.
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Ranking and being read are two different problems
If this checker says your pages are structurally fine and they still earn nothing, the problem is usually the words rather than the shape: the page answers the question and never asks for anything. That is what conversion-focused copy is for. If you do not yet know which pages are the problem, a content audit tells you that first. Disclosure: both are services I sell, so weigh the source accordingly. To start without spending anything, begin with the free audit: a human read of your key pages.