What Is This SEO Analyzer?
AEO Goal’s SEO analyzer is the free AI visibility scan on the homepage. You type in a domain, and a live server-side scan fetches your homepage, your robots.txt, and your llms.txt file, discovers your XML sitemap, and reads what is actually there. It returns an AEO readiness score from 0 to 100, an entity coverage percentage, a checklist of measured signals, and a ranked list of issues. No signup is needed to run it, and the first results render in seconds.
Two things make it different from the average “free SEO checker” widget. First, it checks the signals that decide whether AI answer engines can use your site, not just classic search signals: robots.txt access for 16 AI crawler user agents, llms.txt presence, JSON-LD entity structure, and how clearly your page establishes what your brand is. Second, every line of output is a measured fact read from your real files. There are no LLM calls in the scan, no third-party SEO APIs, and no simulated numbers.
What Exactly Happens When You Run It
The scan runs six steps against your live site:
- Fetch the homepage. Confirms the page responds, is indexable, and can be parsed.
- Check robots.txt for 16 AI crawler agents. Reads your actual rules and reports how many AI user agents (the crawlers used by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and others) are allowed in.
- Check llms.txt. Reports whether the file exists, and whether it actually links to your key pages or is an empty stub.
- Parse JSON-LD structured data. Lists the schema types found, and specifically whether an Organization entity with a sameAs cluster and FAQ markup are present.
- Compute target entity salience. Measures how central your brand entity is on the scanned page, because a page about everything is a weak retrieval source for anything.
- Score AEO readiness. Combines crawler access, structured data, llms.txt, and metadata into a single 0 to 100 score.
You see the score, the entity coverage figure, and your top three issues immediately, with no email required. Entering an email sends the full report; the remaining fixes are listed by severity and category, and their step-by-step remediation details unlock when you create a free account. That is the whole gate, stated plainly.
How To Read Each Signal
A score means nothing until you know which line produced it. Here is how to interpret the checklist the scan returns:
| Signal | What a bad result means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| AI crawler access (n of 16 allowed) | Blocked agents cannot fetch your pages, so those engines cannot cite you from a live crawl | Decide your crawler policy deliberately; see the robots.txt guide |
| Indexable | A noindex directive removes the page from search and from most retrieval | Remove the directive unless the exclusion is intentional |
| robots.txt / Sitemap | Missing files make discovery slower and less reliable | Publish both; reference the sitemap from robots.txt |
| llms.txt | Missing or link-free llms.txt gives AI systems no curated map of your citable pages | Generate one; see llms.txt support |
| Schema (JSON-LD) | No structured data, or data without an Organization entity, leaves engines guessing what your brand is | Add Organization schema with a sameAs cluster; validate it matches visible content |
| Canonical | Missing canonical invites duplicate-URL confusion | Add a self-referencing canonical to every indexable page |
| H1 heading | Zero or multiple H1s blur the page topic | Exactly one H1 that states what the page answers |
| Title / meta description | Missing, truncated, or padded metadata weakens both snippets and retrieval context | Rewrite to the reported length verdict |
| Open Graph | Missing OG tags degrade link previews and some parsers | Add og:title, og:description, og:image |
| Freshness | No dateModified signal makes the page look stale to retrieval systems | Publish and maintain real modification dates |
Decision Rules For Acting On Results
Do not work the list top to bottom. Work it by what blocks what:
- Fix access before content. If AI crawler access reads “blocked” or indexability reads “No”, nothing else on the report matters yet. An engine that cannot fetch the page cannot evaluate it.
- Fix identity before volume. Missing Organization schema and weak entity salience mean engines cannot confidently connect your pages to your brand. Fix that before publishing more content, or the new content inherits the same ambiguity.
- Treat metadata verdicts as fast wins. Title length, meta description, H1 count, and canonical tags are usually one-file fixes. Ship them the same day.
- Re-scan after every batch of fixes. The scan is free and repeatable. The score only becomes useful as a trend: fix, re-run, confirm the line moved. A one-time score screenshot is trivia.
Common Mistakes With SEO Analyzers
- Chasing the score instead of the blockers. An 85 with blocked AI crawlers is worse than a 70 with clean access. Read the lines, not the number.
- Assuming the homepage represents the site. The free scan reads one page. Your money pages may have different templates, different schema, and different problems.
- Adding schema that the page does not support. Structured data that contradicts visible content is a credibility risk, not a boost. See the structured data glossary entry for what engines actually consume.
- Blocking AI crawlers by default. Many CDN and WAF presets block AI user agents silently. If your business wants to appear in AI answers, that default is quietly deleting you from them.
- Fixing once and never verifying. Deploys, plugin updates, and CDN changes routinely reintroduce blockers. Diagnostics decay.
When The Free Scan Is Enough, And When It Is Not
The free scan is enough when you need a fast, honest answer to “is this domain technically eligible to be crawled, indexed, and cited?” It is the right first step before spending anything on content or tooling, and it is a good recurring smoke test after releases.
It is not enough when you need site-wide coverage or outcome measurement. The scan reads one page and cannot tell you whether engines actually cite you. Inside AEO Goal, the site crawler follows internal links across your whole site, scheduled audits re-run technical checks weekly or monthly, and AI citation tracking runs your real prompts against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity to report citation rate, Share of Model, and sentiment per engine. That is the loop the product is built around: find the gap, ship the concrete fix, then re-check whether the fix moved citations or rankings. The analyzer is step one of that loop, offered free; the platform is the loop running continuously across both AI answers and traditional SEO.
Where This Fits In A Program
Run the scan first, ship the access and identity fixes it surfaces, then move to the layers it does not cover: keyword and prompt targeting with the keyword research workflow, site-wide checks with the technical SEO audit, page quality with the content optimizer, and authority with the backlink checker. If you are new to Answer Engine Optimization, the free AEO and SEO course walks the whole sequence.
An honest closing note: no analyzer, free or paid, can guarantee a ranking or an AI citation. Engines own their answers. What a good analyzer controls is the quality of your inputs, and this one tells you, from your live files, exactly which inputs are broken and what to change first.