Spotting & Fixing AEO Gaps with Content Audits: A Practical Guide

AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot reward not just keyword-rich pages, but authoritative, answer-ready content. The only way to know if your site qualifies is with an AEO content audit. Unlike traditional SEO audits, which emphasize rankings and backlinks, an AEO audit looks at coverage, answerability, and schema health. These three dimensions determine whether AI engines view your site as authoritative enough to cite.

Step 1: Coverage

Coverage answers the question: “Do we have content for every query our audience is asking?” Start with Query Fan-Out research using People Also Ask, Reddit, and forums, then map those queries into pillar and cluster structures. If more than 30% of queries in a cluster have no coverage, it’s a gap. Competitive audits show that sites with higher topical coverage are disproportionately cited in Google AI Overviews.

Step 2: Answerability

AI engines cite content that works as standalone mini-answers. Audit whether your intros, FAQs, and body paragraphs open with 2–3 sentence self-contained answers before elaborating. If fewer than 50% of pages pass this test, you’re missing citations.

Step 3: Schema Health

Schema markup is the machine-readable foundation of AEO. Use Google’s Rich Results Test and Schema.org standards to validate. Prioritize FAQPage, HowTo, and Article schema. If more than 20% of your high-value pages fail validation, AI engines may not trust your content. Structured data is also key for crawlability and site architecture.

Measurement & Next Steps

An audit is only as strong as its follow-through. Pair your fixes with KPIs from the AEO KPI Dashboard, including AI Overview filters in GSC, referral traffic from Perplexity, and logged brand mentions. Supplement with screenshots of your citations in AI results to build a case study of progress. Compare your audit deltas against industry benchmarks to contextualize your visibility.