By Stephanie Trovato

An AI engine optimization audit evaluates brand visibility, accuracy, and citations in AI-powered search engines. It highlights how a brand appears across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot, and identifies gaps in the facts, descriptions, and links these systems rely on. In contrast, a traditional SEO audit focuses on website rankings and technical health in classic search engines.

AI search extracts information directly from content, public sources, and structured data. This shift changes how buyers discover brands and validate solutions. Growth-focused teams benefit from precise, consistent brand details in AI summaries, as these summaries influence early research, shortlists, and pipeline creation.

This post gives teams a complete workflow for running an AI engine optimization audit, priority fixes, a practical checklist, and the HubSpot tools that support the process. Each section offers clear steps for testing visibility across AI engines, measuring accuracy, updating content, and publishing structured, AI-friendly pages at scale.

Table of Contents

• What is an AI engine optimization audit?
• Why run an AI engine optimization audit now?
• How to Run an AEO Audit (Step-by-Step)
• Priority Fixes After Your Answer Engine Optimization Audit
• AI Search Optimization Audit Checklist
• Frequently Asked Questions About AI Engine Optimization Audits

What is an AI engine optimization audit?

An AI engine optimization audit is a structured review that measures how accurately AI search engines represent a brand. It evaluates visibility, accuracy, and citations across systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot. The goal is to confirm that AI-generated summaries accurately reflect the brand’s facts, product details, and sources.

An AI engine optimization audit differs from a traditional SEO audit. A traditional SEO audit focuses on rankings, crawlability, and technical health. An AEO audit focuses on entity correctness, brand mentions, citation frequency, and the precision of AI-generated summaries. An AI engine optimization audit identifies outdated facts, missing brand mentions, and incorrect citations in AI summaries. These issues often stem from unstructured pages, unclear entities, and inconsistent context.

AI engines pull information from standalone chunks, structured data, and patterns across the web. They interpret content more accurately when pages use clear headings, defined entities, semantic triples, and consistent formatting.

HubSpot Search Grader provides a free way to assess brand visibility in AI search engines and establish a fast baseline. It complements foundational work such as running a website audit, improving the fundamentals in the technical SEO guide, adding markup from the structured data walkthrough, and reviewing performance in your SEO report.

How AEO, GEO, and SEO Work Together

AEO, GEO, and SEO each strengthen how buyers discover and understand a brand.

• AEO (answer engine optimization) focuses on entity clarity, accurate citations, and how AI engines summarize a brand.
• GEO (generative engine optimization) focuses on performance in generative experiences across channels, including conversational answers and synthesized results.
• SEO (search engine optimization) focuses on rankings, crawlability, and technical performance in traditional search …read more

  Source:: HubSpot Blog

        

  

  Author: Aaron