AEO CITATION AUDIT

Find Out Which Pages AI Engines Cite — and Where Your Competitors Are Beating You

Canadians are asking AI engines questions in English and in French. Those engines are generating answers, citing pages, and shaping purchasing decisions before a single search result is clicked. The AEO Citation Audit from Ignited Nepal is a page-by-page examination of your site's citation performance across five AI engines, tested in both official languages, scored against the competition, and turned into a prioritised roadmap your team can execute. Whether your market is national, provincial, or bilingual-specific, you will leave the audit knowing exactly which pages are earning citations, which are invisible, and which competitor pages are filling the gap where yours should be.

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This is for you if

Who This Is For

This audit is designed for Canadian organisations that understand AI-generated answers have become a real demand channel — and want page-level data rather than general advice about "AI content optimisation."

National brands and retailers operating across English-speaking and French-speaking Canadian markets who need to understand whether their bilingual content strategy is producing citations in both languages, or whether French-language pages are being systematically bypassed by AI engines while English pages earn the citations. The citation gap between English and French content is a measurable, addressable problem — but only if you have tested it.

Financial services, insurance, and professional services firms across Canada's major markets — Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa — where AI-generated answers increasingly influence which providers potential clients research and contact. When an AI engine cites a competitor's explainer page in response to a question your firm should definitively own, that is a business development problem with a content solution.

Technology companies and SaaS businesses headquartered in Canada or serving primarily Canadian markets, with content libraries that include product pages, comparison guides, pricing pages, and help documentation. These organisations have typically invested heavily in traditional SEO and need to understand how that investment maps — or fails to map — onto AI citation performance.

Government-adjacent organisations, not-for-profits, and regulated sector businesses that produce substantial volumes of informational content — policy summaries, programme explanations, service descriptions — which should be natural AI citation candidates but are often formatted in ways that suppress citation rates. These organisations frequently rank well in traditional search without earning corresponding AI citations, because the structural issues are different.

What's broken

What's Broken

Your French-language pages are likely earning far fewer AI citations than your English-language pages.

Most Canadian organisations with bilingual websites have never tested this. The assumption is that if a French page ranks in Google, it will be cited in French AI responses at a comparable rate to the equivalent English page. That assumption is wrong in a significant proportion of cases. French-language content citation dynamics differ from English: the query patterns are different, the competitive set is different, and the structural content signals that trigger French-language AI citations are not identical to those that work in English. Without testing both, you have half a picture at best.

AI engines are citing your competitors for queries your content should own.

In virtually every B2B and B2C category operating in Canada, there are between three and six competitor domains that have established strong citation positions in AI-generated answers. Those competitors are being cited repeatedly — in English and in French — for questions that your buyers are asking. Every time that happens, AI is directing purchasing intent toward your competitor. The mechanism is not mysterious. Those competitor pages have structural and content characteristics that make them easy for AI systems to extract and cite. The gap is closable, but only once you know where it is.

You are spending content budget in the wrong places.

Content investment decisions in most organisations are driven by keyword research, traffic data, and editorial instinct. None of those inputs tells you which existing pages are close to earning AI citations and simply need structural fixes, versus which pages have no citation potential regardless of how much they are edited. Without citation data, budget flows to projects that may have minimal impact on AI visibility while high-potential pages sit unaddressed. The audit replaces this inefficiency with a ranked priority list.

You have no bilingual citation baseline.

The absence of a documented starting point means there is no way to measure improvement. Teams make content changes based on best practices but cannot demonstrate whether those changes are increasing citation rates in English, in French, or in both. The audit establishes the baseline — a documented citation score for every tested URL in both languages — that makes measurement and accountability possible.

What we engineer

What We Do

Full URL Citation Score Report (English and French)

citation scores for every tested page, separated by language of query, with raw citation counts by AI engine and by query category

Competitor Citation Comparison Matrix

citation rates and cited URL lists for three competitors, tested against the same bilingual query set, with gap mapping showing which competitor pages are cited where yours are not

Query-Level Citation Log

complete record of every query tested, every AI engine response, and every cited page, preserved as a reference document

Bilingual Citation Gap Analysis

specific analysis of the citation performance differential between your English and French pages, including identified structural and content factors driving any gap

Gap and Opportunity Analysis

identification of uncited pages with high citation potential, query categories where competitors are cited and you are absent, and content gaps in both languages

Prioritised Content Opportunity Roadmap

ranked list of page fixes and new content recommendations ordered by citation opportunity and implementation effort, with bilingual tracks clearly identified

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What changes

What Changes

Before

After

Before You have a bilingual citation baseline for the first time.

After The audit establishes documented citation scores for every tested page in both English and French. That baseline makes it possible to measure the impact of content improvements over time, report on AI visibility performance in both languages, and understand where the gap between English and French citation performance is most significant. Organisations that make decisions based on this kind of data move faster and waste less content budget.

Before Your bilingual content strategy gets a real-world performance check.

After Most Canadian organisations have invested in French-language content to serve francophone markets and meet accessibility or regulatory requirements. The audit tells you whether that investment is producing AI citations in French-language responses. For many organisations, this will be the first time they have seen actual performance data on their French-language content in AI contexts — and the findings often shift priorities significantly.

Before Your team can brief competitors on a specific, prioritised list.

After The competitor citation mapping gives your content team something more useful than a general instruction to "compete better." It gives them a list of specific competitor URLs that are currently being cited for specific queries, with notes on what those pages are doing structurally and topically that your current pages are not. That level of specificity turns abstract competitive awareness into concrete content tasks.

Before Your content decisions are grounded in citation economics.

After The prioritised roadmap orders every recommendation by the ratio of citation opportunity to implementation effort. High-opportunity fixes that require editing an existing page appear at the top. Long-form new content projects that require significant production resources appear further down — unless the citation opportunity is large enough to justify the investment. Your team can work through the list in order and know that they are acting on the highest-value items first.

Common questions

FAQ

What is an AEO Citation Audit?

An AEO Citation Audit is a URL-level analysis of how frequently each page on your website is cited in AI-generated answers, tested across five AI engines, in both English and French Canadian, and benchmarked against three competitors. The output is a documented set of citation scores per page, a competitor comparison matrix, and a prioritised action roadmap — not a general report on AI industry trends or a broad visibility assessment. It tells you, for each page on your site, how often that page appears in AI-generated answers for the query set relevant to your category.

How is this different from an AI Visibility Audit?

The AI Visibility Audit assesses your domain's overall presence in AI systems — how well AI engines recognise your brand, what entities and topics they associate with you, and what authority signals your domain carries. The AEO Citation Audit goes to the page level: it tests specific URLs against specific queries and produces a citation score for each page. Think of the AI Visibility Audit as measuring your organisation's overall standing in AI systems, and the AEO Citation Audit as measuring the performance of individual pages within that system. Most organisations benefit from completing the AI Visibility Audit first.

What does a page citation score tell me?

A page citation score tells you how frequently a specific URL on your site was cited across the full bilingual query set and across all five AI engines tested, expressed as a percentage of maximum possible citations. A page with a high citation score is being consistently referenced by AI engines when answering relevant questions. A page with a score of zero has not been cited for any query in the test set — which means it is invisible in AI-generated answers regardless of how it performs in traditional search. The score is a starting point for understanding why, and the gap analysis explains the structural and content factors behind low scores.

How long does the audit take?

The standard bilingual AEO Citation Audit takes twelve to fifteen business days from query set approval. The query set is built and reviewed in the first three to four days. Bilingual citation testing and competitor mapping take six to eight days. Analysis, roadmap preparation, and bilingual document production are completed in the final two to three days. Expedited delivery in eight business days is available at an additional charge.

What does the audit cost?

The bilingual AEO Citation Audit for Canadian markets is priced from CAD $3,200 for sites with up to 200 tested URLs. Sites with larger URL sets or requirements for more than three competitor domains are quoted individually. All engagements are fixed-fee. Payment is split fifty per cent at engagement and fifty per cent on delivery of the final roadmap.

What happens after the audit is delivered?

The audit delivers your baseline and your roadmap — acting on the roadmap is the next step. Ignited Nepal offers a content improvement programme for organisations that want support implementing the roadmap's recommendations, including English and French page rewrites, structural fixes, and new content production. Clients who prefer to take the roadmap to their own teams or content partners are equally well served — the roadmap is formatted for use by any content or SEO team. A post-delivery review session is included at no charge within thirty days of delivery.

Our team

The people behind the work

Not a black box. Real specialists you can call, with their names on the work.

Niraj Raut

Founder — Ecommerce SEO

Keshab Joshi

PPC Expert

Hawrry Bhattarai

Google Ads Expert

Arogya Rijal

SaaS SEO Expert

About Us →

Start here

Your bilingual content is being tested by AI engines in English and French every day — the question is whether it's passing.

The AEO Citation Audit gives you the complete, documented picture of how your pages perform in AI-generated answers in both official languages, how that performance compares to your three closest competitors, and what to do about it in ranked priority order.

Run an AI Visibility Audit →

Run an AI Visibility Audit