What is an AEO Citation Audit?
An AEO Citation Audit is a structured measurement of which pages on your website are being cited by AI engines when they answer questions in your market. It tests every page against a custom query set across five AI platforms, builds a citation score per URL, compares your performance against competitors, and delivers a prioritised roadmap for improving your citation rate. It is, at its core, a measurement tool — designed to produce actionable data rather than general recommendations.
How is this different from the AI Visibility Audit?
The AI Visibility Audit gives you a broad read on how your brand appears across AI engines overall. The AEO Citation Audit works at the individual page level: every URL on your site is tested, scored, and mapped against specific queries. Where the AI Visibility Audit answers "are we showing up in AI answers?", the Citation Audit answers "which of our pages are showing up, for which queries, how often, and what are our competitors doing better on the queries where we're absent?" It is a significantly more granular instrument.
What does page-level citation scoring mean in practice?
Each page on your site receives a numerical citation score based on how many queries in the test set it was cited for, across how many engines, and with what consistency. A page with a high score is one AI engines regularly trust and reference. A page with a score of zero is being skipped entirely — even if it covers relevant topics and ranks in traditional search. The score gives your team a comparable metric per URL: you can rank pages, spot high-performing clusters, identify underperformers, and make targeted optimisation decisions based on where the data shows the biggest gap between potential and actual citation performance.
How long does the audit take?
The AEO Citation Audit takes ten to fourteen business days from project start to final delivery. The query testing phase is the most time-intensive component — each query must be tested across five AI engines and the results documented systematically. This cannot be meaningfully compressed without sacrificing accuracy. Fourteen days gives us the time to build a complete and reliable dataset, run the competitor mapping thoroughly, and produce a roadmap that reflects the full picture.
What does the AEO Citation Audit cost?
The AEO Citation Audit is priced from AUD 3,500 for a standard audit covering up to 50 pages, a 100-query test set, and three competitors. Sites with larger page counts or more complex competitive environments are scoped individually. The price is fixed-fee — you know the investment before work begins. There are no variable charges depending on what the audit finds.
What happens after the audit is delivered?
You receive the full deliverable package: page citation scorecard, query-to-page map, competitor comparison report, content gap register, and prioritised roadmap. From there, you have three clear options. You can take the roadmap to your internal team and implement the recommendations yourself using the detailed guidance provided. You can engage Ignited Nepal to execute the roadmap through our content and technical AEO implementation services. Or you can use the audit as a baseline and schedule a re-test in three to six months to measure how your citation rate has shifted. The audit is a complete, standalone deliverable — no retainer is required to make use of it.
