What is an AEO Citation Audit?
An AEO Citation Audit is a structured investigation of which pages on your website are being cited by AI engines when they generate answers to queries in your market. It tests your pages against a custom query set across multiple AI platforms, records citation performance per URL, compares your results against competitors, and produces a prioritised roadmap for improving your citation rate. It is a measurement exercise first and a strategic tool second — you cannot improve what you have not measured.
How is this different from the AI Visibility Audit?
The AI Visibility Audit gives you a broad picture of how visible your brand is across AI engines overall. The AEO Citation Audit goes deeper: it works at the individual page level, testing each URL against a specific query set and producing a citation score per page. Where the AI Visibility Audit tells you whether you're showing up, the Citation Audit tells you exactly which pages are showing up, for which queries, how often, and what your competitors' pages are doing better on the queries where you're absent.
What does page-level citation scoring mean in practice?
Each page on your site receives a citation score based on how many queries in the test set it was cited for, across how many AI engines, and how consistently. A page with a high citation score is one that AI engines regularly trust and reference. A page with a low score — or a score of zero — is being skipped, even if it covers the right topics. The score gives your team a concrete, comparable metric for every URL: you can rank pages, identify clusters of strong and weak performers, and make targeted decisions about where optimisation effort will move the needle.
How long does the audit take?
The AEO Citation Audit takes ten to fourteen business days from project start to delivery of the full report and roadmap. The query set build and citation testing phases are the most time-intensive steps because each query must be tested across five AI engines and documented systematically. Rushing this process produces incomplete data. Fourteen days is the window that allows thorough testing, accurate competitor mapping, and a roadmap that reflects the full picture rather than a partial sample.
What does the AEO Citation Audit cost?
The AEO Citation Audit is priced from NPR 85,000 for a standard site audit covering up to 50 pages, a 100-query test set, and three competitors. Larger sites or more complex competitive landscapes are scoped individually. The investment is fixed-fee — you know the cost before the work begins, and there are no variable charges based on what the audit finds.
What happens after the audit is delivered?
You receive a complete deliverable package: the page citation scorecard, the query-to-page map, the competitor comparison report, and the prioritised roadmap. From there, you have three options. You can take the roadmap to your internal team and implement the recommendations yourself. You can engage Ignited Nepal to implement the roadmap through our content and technical AEO services. Or you can use the audit findings as the basis for a re-test in three to six months to measure how your citation rate has changed. The audit stands alone as a complete output — no ongoing retainer is required to use it.
