aeo-readiness 1.0.0

AEO Readiness Check v1.0.0

Status

• Version: 1.0.0
• Check identifier: aeo-readiness
• Input contract: [email protected]
• Output contract: [email protected]
• Scope: page

Abstract

The AEO Readiness check evaluates whether a public HTML page exposes visible, structured, trustworthy answer content that answer engines, search answer surfaces, and assistants can extract and attribute.

This check does not promise inclusion in Google featured snippets, People Also Ask, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Bing Copilot, voice assistants, or any proprietary answer surface.

Motivation

Answer engines work best when pages expose direct answer passages, clear question and heading structure, visible entity definitions, source evidence, and accountable publisher signals. These patterns help humans first: they make a page easier to scan, understand, cite, and trust.

AEO is an emerging practice rather than a formal protocol. This check therefore evaluates observable readiness signals instead of claiming standards conformance or answer-engine visibility.

Normative Model

The check models AEO readiness as six independent validation steps:

Step weights are normalized decimals and sum to 1.0.

Applicability

The check applies to public HTML pages intended to answer questions, explain concepts, describe products or services, provide documentation, compare options, publish advice, or support decision-making.

Applicable pages include:

• Homepages and landing pages with explanatory content.
• Product, service, feature, pricing, and comparison pages.
• Blog posts, guides, docs, reports, help articles, and FAQs.
• Public advice, review, support, policy, or knowledge-base pages.

The check is lower-signal for login-only pages, dashboards, checkout pages, internal tools, visual-only portfolios, binary assets, API JSON, redirects, and pages intentionally hidden from public answer surfaces.

Pass Criteria

The check passes when the weighted score is at least 90/100.

A passing page normally has:

• Meaningful visible explanatory text.
• Major answer-relevant sections that begin with clear, concise answers where natural.
• Headings that expose the page's answer structure without confusing hierarchy.
• Natural question headings, FAQ/Q&A pairs, lists, or tables where they improve clarity.
• Clear entity/topic alignment across title, h1, description, and visible copy.
• At least one direct definition or equivalent explanatory sentence.
• Source, author, publisher, date, sameAs, about/contact, or policy evidence where relevant.
• Snippet controls that do not remove text needed for answer extraction.
• Retrieval and user-triggered answer crawlers allowed for public content when robots evidence is available.

Warning Criteria

The check warns when the weighted score is from 50 through 89.

Warnings include:

• Visible copy exists but is thin or difficult to extract.
• Sections have headings but bury or omit direct answer openings.
• Question headings are absent on a page that clearly answers common questions.
• FAQ/Q&A markup exists but is incomplete or only partially visible.
• Title, h1, description, and definitions are weakly aligned.
• Missing source/date/author/publisher evidence on advice, review, legal, medical, financial, or factual pages.
• Low nonzero max-snippet values or important text wrapped in data-nosnippet.
• Retrieval crawler access is unconfirmed or partially blocked.

Failure Criteria

The check fails when the weighted score is below 50.

Failures include:

• No meaningful visible answer text is present.
• No answer-relevant headings, definitions, or passages can be found.
• Structured Q&A markup materially conflicts with visible content.
• nosnippet or max-snippet:0 removes snippet eligibility for a page intended for answer surfaces.
• Retrieval or user-triggered answer crawlers are blocked for public answer content.
• The page is primarily hidden, blocked, or client-only in a way that prevents answer extraction.

Evidence Model

The result emits:

• Final URL, raw HTML byte count, and visible word count.
• Step-level score and weight.
• Visible copy count, answer-intent term count, HTML size, and client-rendering root signals.
• Answer-section diagnostics including headings, first paragraphs, word counts, direct-answer status, and definition patterns.
• Heading outline issues, natural question headings, visible Q&A pairs, table/list counts, detected FAQ/Q&A patterns, and Q&A structured-data parity.
• Title, h1 values, description, topic overlap, primary terms, and definition matches.
• Author, publisher, date, sameAs, citation/source, about/contact, and policy evidence.
• Meta robots, X-Robots-Tag, nosnippet, max-snippet, and data-nosnippet controls.
• /robots.txt fetch status, excerpt, answer crawler access decisions, matched user-agent groups, matched rules, and winning rules.

Evidence must not include full HTML, credentials, cookies, authorization headers, or private data.

Validation And Scoring Steps

1. Parse the scanned HTML and extract visible text while ignoring script, style, SVG, and noscript content.
2. Score extractable visible copy using visible word count, answer-oriented terms, initial HTML size, and client-rendering root signals.
3. Inspect h2/h3 answer sections and score concise answer openings and definition patterns.
4. Inspect heading hierarchy, natural question headings, visible Q&A pairs, FAQ/Q&A patterns, lists, tables, and light Q&A structured-data parity.
5. Score entity and definition clarity using title, h1 count, description, topic overlap, primary terms, and direct definitions.
6. Score evidence and trust using authorship, publisher, freshness dates, source/citation links, sameAs/entity references, about/contact links, and policy links.
7. Inspect snippet controls from meta robots, X-Robots-Tag, and data-nosnippet.
8. Fetch /robots.txt from the origin and evaluate relevant answer retrieval and user-triggered crawlers for the scanned path.
9. Compute the weighted 0-100 score using the published step weights. Pass is >=90, warning is 50-89, and fail is <50.

Standard Behavior

The check treats answer-first content as a readability and extraction heuristic, not as a universal writing formula. It rewards direct section openings only where a page has answer-relevant headings and visible explanatory content.

The check treats FAQPage, QAPage, Question, and Answer schema as supporting evidence when the page naturally contains Q&A content. It does not require these vocabularies for every answer-ready page and does not replace specialized structured-data checks.

The check evaluates snippet controls for answer extraction:

• nosnippet and max-snippet:0 are severe blockers when answer-surface visibility is intended.
• Low nonzero max-snippet values are warning-level restrictions.
• data-nosnippet is detected as a boolean attribute on span, div, and section elements.

The check evaluates retrieval and user-triggered answer crawlers separately from model-improvement or policy crawlers:

• OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User.
• PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User.
• Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User.
• GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended are reported as non-scored policy/model-improvement evidence.

Robots evaluation follows RFC 9309-oriented behavior:

• User-agent groups are parsed from /robots.txt.
• Relevant groups are matched case-insensitively by crawler product token.
• Matching groups with the most specific user-agent token are evaluated.
• Path rules are evaluated against the scanned URL path and query.
• Allow and Disallow path patterns support * and $.
• The most specific matching rule wins; tied Allow rules win over Disallow.
• Empty or absent matching rules allow crawling for the evaluated path.

Non-Standard And Real-World Behavior

AEO is not a formal web standard. Search engines and AI answer systems use proprietary ranking, retrieval, and generation systems. Pages with strong AEO readiness can still be omitted, and pages with imperfect readiness can still appear when they contain uniquely useful content.

CMS, SEO plugins, and design systems often generate FAQ blocks, accordions, JSON-LD, or comparison tables. These patterns are useful only when they reflect visible, user-accessible page content.

Question-style headings can clarify answer sections, but forced question headings can make a page worse. The check reports them as readiness evidence, not as a universal content mandate.

Non-Goals And Limitations

This check does not:

• Promise inclusion, ranking, citations, traffic, impressions, or clicks from any answer surface.
• Test live search results, answer engines, voice assistants, or AI chat responses.
• Require FAQPage, QAPage, llms.txt, Markdown alternates, RSL, AI-only files, or special AI metadata.
• Fully validate structured data; specialized structured-data checks own that behavior.
• Depend on GEO, AIO, FAQPage, QAPage, structured-data, or crawler-check outputs.
• Treat training-crawler access as an answer-readiness requirement.
• Verify real-world expertise, source accuracy, or author credentials beyond page-visible evidence.
• Execute arbitrary client-side JavaScript to recover hidden content.

References

• www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/page-structure/headings
• schema.org/FAQPage
• schema.org/Question
• schema.org/Answer
• schema.org/QAPage
• developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/faqpage
• developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/qapage
• developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/sd-policies
• developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/featured-snippets
• developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
• platform.openai.com/docs/bots
• docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots
• support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler
• www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9309.html

aeo-readiness v1.0.0 Changelog

• Defines the initial AEO readiness contract for visible, structured, trustworthy answer content.
• Scores extractable visible copy, answer-first passages, question-and-answer structure, entity and definition clarity, evidence and trust, and answer-surface controls.
• Treats FAQPage, QAPage, Question, and Answer schema as supporting evidence when they match visible Q&A content, not as universal requirements.
• Adds snippet-control and answer retrieval crawler evidence for answer-surface readiness.
• Separates retrieval and user-triggered answer crawlers from model-improvement and policy crawlers.