1. Ask the engines about you (5 minutes)
Prompt several assistants to describe your company, list what you sell, and name who you are for. Read the answers as a stranger would. Every inaccuracy or omission here is a backlog item, and wrong descriptions have their own correction path.
2. Ask them your category question (5 minutes)
Ask the unbranded question a buyer would ask — best supplier for X, how to choose an X — and note who appears. If you don’t, note who does and what their page says that yours doesn’t.
3. Check your self-description is one sentence (3 minutes)
Compare how you describe yourself on the homepage, in your footer, and on your main profiles. Three different descriptions is the most common finding in this audit and among the cheapest to fix.
Most AIEO problems are found in the first ten minutes and are embarrassingly cheap to fix.
4. Pull one paragraph out of context (5 minutes)
Take any paragraph from a key page and read it alone. If it no longer means anything, the page is written as a narrative rather than as a set of quotable passages.
5. Look for the facts you refuse to state (5 minutes)
Search your own site for price, timeline, and scope. If the answer everywhere is “it depends”, you are absent from every prompt about cost — which is what a pricing page is actually for now.
6. Validate your structured data (7 minutes)
Check that an Organization block exists, that it is referenced from your other schema, and that nothing in it contradicts the visible copy. Decorative markup is harmless; contradictory markup is not.
What to do with the findings
Fix the contradictions first, then the missing facts, then the structure. Publishing new content before those three are handled is building on a foundation the engines currently mistrust.