AEO Tools & Resources

Practical tools for implementing and validating AEO. No affiliate links, no sponsored recommendations — just the tools that work.

Schema Validation

Google Rich Results Test

Tests whether your structured data qualifies for Google rich results. Also validates JSON-LD syntax.

Schema.org Validator

Official Schema.org validator. Tests markup against the full Schema.org vocabulary.

JSON-LD Playground

Interactive JSON-LD editor for testing and debugging. Shows how JSON-LD expands, compacts, and frames.

Crawler Testing

You can test whether AI crawlers can access your site by making requests with their user agents. Use these curl commands to simulate crawler requests:

terminal
# Test GPTBot access
curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/gptbot" https://yoursite.com

# Test ClaudeBot access
curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +https://www.anthropic.com/claude-bot)" https://yoursite.com

# Test PerplexityBot access
curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)" https://yoursite.com

# Check robots.txt
curl https://yoursite.com/robots.txt

# Check llms.txt
curl https://yoursite.com/llms.txt

If any curl command returns a 403 or redirect to a captcha page, your WAF or hosting provider is blocking AI crawlers. See /implementation/robots-txt for the fix.

AI Visibility Testing

Manual protocol for testing AI visibility across major platforms:

  1. ChatGPT — Enable web search. Ask about your entity.
  2. Perplexity — Always uses web search. Ask about your entity.
  3. Google Gemini — Use web-grounded mode. Ask about your entity.
  4. Claude — Enable web search in the artifacts panel. Ask about your entity.

For each platform, check: Are you mentioned? Are you cited with a link? Are the facts accurate?

See /measuring/ai-visibility-score for the full scoring protocol.

Site Audit Tools

Google Lighthouse

Built into Chrome DevTools. Run an SEO audit — many SEO best practices overlap with AEO (semantic HTML, meta tags, performance).

View Page Source

The most underrated tool. View your page source (Ctrl+U / Cmd+U) and search for "application/ld+json" to verify JSON-LD is in the HTML. If it is not there, your structured data is not server-rendered.

Chrome JSON-LD Viewer Extension

Browser extensions that detect and display structured data on any page.

Content Analysis

Word count check

Paste content into any word counter. Guide pages should be 1,500+ words. Review pages 800+. Below these thresholds, content may not meet citation depth requirements.

Heading structure check

View page source and search for h1, h2, h3 tags. Verify one H1, no skipped levels, and logical hierarchy.

First paragraph test

Read only the first paragraph of each page. If it does not answer the page's core question, rewrite it (BLUF principle).

Build an audit routine

Build a monthly audit routine: validate schemas after deployments, test crawler access quarterly, and run AI visibility scoring monthly. Consistency matters more than perfection.

See /reference/checklist for the complete implementation checklist.