How to Audit Your Startup's AEO Presence

Summary

• AEO visibility is now a purchase driver: 73% of B2B buyers use AI tools to research before buying. If your brand isn't cited in AI search results, you're losing deals to competitors who are.
• Start with a manual prompt audit: Build 10–15 prompts your ideal customers would ask, test them across AI search engines, and log where your brand appears, how it's described, and which competitors show up consistently.
• Audit your citability signals: AI engines favor brands with structured content, topical authority, entity clarity, and strong third-party mentions (earned media accounts for up to 84% of all AI citations).
• Use a monitoring tool to track progress over time: Once you have a manual baseline, tools like HubSpot AEO, Otterly.AI, and Goodie AI can automate ongoing visibility tracking so you can focus on improving.
• Act on what you find: Whether you're invisible, misrepresented, or being outranked by competitors, each scenario has a distinct set of fixes. AI search results shift roughly every two days, so auditing regularly is essential.

Introduction

Even if your brand ranks in traditional search results thanks to concentrated SEO efforts, you may not be showing up where people are actually searching these days. With shifts to LLMs, your buyers are out there looking for you on platforms like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. But without strong AEO, or answer engine optimization, efforts, you won’t show up. An AEO audit can help.

What is an AEO audit? An AEO audit is the process where you can evaluate how AI search engines are describing your brand and how often your brand is cited or recommended to users.

Today, about 73% of B2B buyers use AI tools for researching ahead of making purchase decisions. If your brand doesn’t show up in these results, you’re out of sight, out of mind, and losing those sales to competitors.

With this simple framework, you can audit your startup’s current AEO presence to help inform your AEO strategy moving forward.

Why does AEO presence matter for startups?

AEO can level the playing field when it comes to showing up in search results as a new brand. As long as your customers are mentioning you online, even on social media or platforms like Reddit, you can build more brand visibility. From there, topical authority across multiple channels further drives more citations and recommendations.

People are turning to AI for search more than ever before. ChatGPT, the most-used AI search tool, has over 900M weekly users.

But even for people that don’t directly use an AI tool to search, millions of users are interacting with AI overviews on traditional search platforms. According to Google, its own AI mode now has over 1B monthly users.

AI overviews make up a large share of responses to search queries, but they often lead to lower rates of organic traffic for brands. According to Ahrefs, AI overviews in search results lead to a 34.5% decline in the average clickthrough rate (CTR). Zero-click search is the name of the game now. However, even if users don’t click your website, buyers that see your brand cited or referred by AI will keep you top of mind when they’re prepared to buy.

This is actually great news for startups: you don’t need a huge SEO and AEO budget to hold a candle to long-standing enterprises in search results anymore. Early AEO investments can put you front-and-center for AI search results, but you need to know where you currently stand, and how to continuously improve, with an AEO audit.

AEO audit strategy for startups

AI search results are constantly shifting, so startups need to implement a recurring audit process ASAP to keep their brands appearing again and again, even as algorithms change. Here’s how to perform an audit to monitor your startup’s AEO presence.

Step 1: Do a manual prompt audit

Before you invest in tech for automated auditing, you want to dig in and get your hands dirty with a manual audit to really understand where your brand stands.

1. Build a prompt list

Just as you would do keyword research for an SEO strategy, it’s time to brainstorm what your ideal customers are searching. People tend to search via questions and longer phrases with AI, rather than short keywords. Come up with at least 10 to 15 prompts, such as "Best CRM for early-stage SaaS startups", "What tools do growth marketers at seed-stage companies use?", "Top [your category] tools for startups." Include category-level, problem-level, and comparison prompts.

2. Test across engines

Now, let’s see who pops up in the responses. Using different AI search tools, including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and Perplexity, input each prompt. Create a spreadsheet to log whether or not and how your brand appears for each prompt, as well as what other brands are cited. You can copy the below example to help jumpstart your spreadsheet:

3. Score your visibility

After filling in a spreadsheet for each prompt and testing across different engines, create a rough “mention rate” based on how frequently your brand is cited and mentioned compared to how often it’s not mentioned at all per prompt and AI tool.

4. Note competitor positioning

Now, analyze which competitors are mentioned multiple times across the different prompts and engines. Make notes of how the AI mentions or cites each competitor and where the citations come from (such as through earned media, Reddit, or the company’s own website).

Step 2: Audit your startup’s citability signals

Citability signals refer to the source elements that lend context and credibility that make it more likely for an AI engine to utilize that source in its citations. Here’s what AI engines are looking for and how to audit these elements within your own content and brand mentions.

• Structured content: Your website pages and blogs should use clear H2 and H3 headings, offer concise paragraphs that answer questions, and include FAQ schema to capture other related longtail inquiries. Pages that directly answer specific questions are more likely to be cited. Inputting schema markups in the backend code may also give your brand a boost.
• Topical authority: Startups have a big opportunity to stand out from enterprises with deep, expert knowledge. Your website should include consistent posts of in-depth, industry-related content. Similar to how search engines incorporate EEAT for SEO, AI engines favor sources that demonstrate sustained expertise in a defined subject area.
• Third-party mentions: This is another huge component to getting cited, as Muck Rack reported up to 84% of all AI citations come from earned media. Does your brand have mentions on review sites and Reddit or within trade press and startup communities? AI engines tap into a broad range of web sources to develop overviews and results, so the more external mentions you have, the stronger your chance of a brand citation or referral.
• Entity clarity: Don’t overlook simplicity and clarity in everything you do. It’s tempting to dive deep into your startup’s story, but AI looks for clear, concise terms when developing responses. Does your website clearly and consistently define what your company does, who it's for, and what category it belongs to?

Here’s a quick checklist to follow in analyzing your startup’s citability:

• Website homepage includes a one-sentence, jargon-free description of what your startup does
• The core product or feature pages include an FAQ section
• Your brand has been cited as a source or vendor on at least five different external websites
• Your website’s blog section has useful information that answers specific user questions within your industry, not just product or company updates

Step 3: Choose an AEO monitoring tool

Now that you have a deep understanding of your brand’s existing AEO presence and citability signals, you can start making improvements. But rather than going through this time-consuming manual audit again every time you make adjustments to your strategy, you can use a monitoring tool to automate the work, giving you more time to keep improving.

• HubSpot AEO Grader: This is a free tool you can use to get a quick, concise snapshot of your brand’s presence across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. You can also tap the paid HubSpot AEO tool, which tracks your brand’s AEO presence across engines over time and makes smart recommendations to improve visibility and close the gap against competitors.
• Otterly.AI: This tool tracks brand visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot. It’s best for founders who want an accessible entry point without enterprise pricing.
• Goodie AI: Focused on accuracy and brand-representation monitoring, Goodie is good for startups that are worried about AI misrepresenting their products or services. It also measures performance outcomes to help you track the ROI of your AEO investments.
• SE Ranking: This tool integrates Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) with traditional SEO tracking in one workflow, making it ideal for founders who want one dashboard. The brand also offers additional tools for tracking AEO and social media performance.

Step 4: What to do with your AEO audit findings

You’re nearly ready to close the audit loop, but you need to establish action items you’ll follow after each audit based on the results. Here’s how to act based on your startup’s AEO audit:

1. If you're not appearing at all: Prioritize a strong content structure (including schema on posts and pages, including FAQs on product pages, and creating a clear definition of your brand on your homepage and about pages) and third-party mentions. The more authentic mentions you can gain through press, reviews, and social media, the better chance you have at AI citing and referring your company to users.
2. If you're appearing but misrepresented: Audit your own homepage and "About" copy to make sure it’s up-to-date with information about your brand. Update your press kit, and consider creating product description pages specifically written for AI readability. Then, look at third-party mentions. Make sure positive customer experiences are far outweighing any negative feedback, and handle negative feedback quickly and with kindness while making improvements to minimize negative sentiments moving forward.
3. If competitors are consistently outranking you: Analyze what sources are citing your competitors and how they are describing the competitors. Create a list of these sources and similar outlets and target distribution efforts toward gaining mentions in these places.

Auditing your startup’s AEO presence isn’t something you do just once. AI search results for the same prompts change roughly every two days, so startups must continue monitoring and improving their AEO strategy and measuring results. Quarterly or even monthly AEO audits can help keep your startup top of (artificial) mind.

Conclusion: Regularly audit for AEO presence to drive positive growth

AI visibility is a must-have for startups that want any chance to outperform their competitors, even if some of those competitors are enterprises.

The good news is that strategizing for AEO doesn’t require massive budgets, and regular AEO audits and improvements can actually make brand mentions and a growing customer base more accessible than ever for startups.

Buyers are using AI to do the research that drives their purchasing decisions. So if your citability signals are out, your brand is invisible.

Startups will have to combine SEO efforts with a strong AEO strategy to drive awareness through top-of-funnel customers performing zero-click searches and high-quality leads via organic traffic through high rankings on the traditional SERP. To instantly start increasing AI visibility, use the HubSpot AEO tool to audit, improve, and monitor your AEO efforts.