AEO Scoring Methodology

Measures the presence and quality of Schema.org JSON-LD markup (Organization, Product, FAQ, BreadcrumbList, LocalBusiness). AI assistants rely heavily on structured data to extract facts about a brand. Scores increase with valid markup, depth of properties, and coverage across page types.

Evaluates heading hierarchy (H1 - H4), passage organization, FAQ blocks, and content chunking. AI models prefer content that is broken into clear, answerable sections. Linear walls of text score lower than well-structured passages with explicit question/answer patterns.

Tests whether the brand is clearly identified as a single entity across the site: consistent name, About page presence, clear value proposition, named people, address, contact info. Brand entities that AI can resolve to a single identity score higher.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. Looks for author bylines, credentials, dates, testimonials, case studies, citations from external sources, press mentions, and third-party reviews. Brands with strong external validation score higher.

Crawlability, robots.txt, llms.txt, sitemap.xml, page speed, mobile responsiveness, HTTPS, semantic HTML. AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, etc.) must be able to reach and parse the content. Sites that block AI crawlers or load slowly score lower.

Whether AI answer engines surface and reference the brand for relevant questions in its category. This is the outcome the other signals drive toward, and the most direct read on real AI visibility.

Signals from the wider web that tell AI engines a brand is established and trusted, independent of its own site: inbound links from other sites, overall domain trust, presence in AI knowledge graphs, news and press coverage, and community discussion. Off-page authority is a strong driver of whether AI engines cite a brand. It is derived entirely from our own crawling and analysis.

How Brands Are Scored

Every score comes from our own crawling and analysis of the public web: a brand's own site plus the wider web signals that establish its authority. Scoring runs on a rolling schedule, and a brand is re-scored when it is claimed or when its content changes materially. The specific signals, thresholds, and category weights are proprietary, so the score stays hard to game.

License and Attribution

All Engagemii AEO scores, the methodology, and the brand directory are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may reuse, republish, or build on this data freely, provided you give visible credit to Engagemii with a link to engagemii.com.

See the full license terms at engagemii.com/license.