What is an AEO Citation Audit?
An AEO Citation Audit is a structured, systematic analysis of which pages on your website are being cited by AI engines when they generate answers to questions in your market. It tests every indexed page against a custom-built query set across five AI platforms, produces a citation score per URL, compares your performance against three competitors, and delivers a prioritised roadmap for improving your citation rate. The output is a complete measurement of where you stand in AI-generated answers — specific, comparable, and directly actionable.
How is this different from the AI Visibility Audit?
The AI Visibility Audit gives you a brand-level view of how your company appears in AI answers overall. The AEO Citation Audit operates at the individual page level: every URL is tested against the full query set, scored, and mapped to specific queries. The competitor analysis goes deeper too — rather than comparing brand-level visibility, it tests the same query set against three competitors and identifies specifically which of their pages are outperforming yours and why. For US businesses in competitive categories where the margin between winning and losing citations is a structural difference rather than a content quality difference, this level of granularity is what makes the analysis actionable.
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 of the five AI engines, and with what frequency. A page with a high score is one that AI engines trust, reference consistently, and use as source material for answers. A page with a score of zero is being passed over — regardless of how relevant its content is, how well it ranks in traditional search, or how much editorial effort went into producing it. The score gives every URL on your site a concrete, comparable metric. That comparability is what makes prioritisation decisions data-driven rather than instinct-driven.
How long does the audit take?
The AEO Citation Audit takes ten to fourteen business days from project kickoff to final delivery of the complete report and roadmap. The citation testing phase — running 100 or more queries across five AI engines for your site and three competitors — is the most time-intensive part of the engagement and cannot be meaningfully compressed without producing unreliable results. Fourteen business days is the window that allows complete testing, thorough competitor mapping, and a roadmap built on a full and accurate dataset rather than a partial sample.
What does the AEO Citation Audit cost?
The AEO Citation Audit is priced from USD 1,200 for a standard engagement covering up to 50 pages, a 100-query test set, and three competitors. Larger sites, more complex competitive environments, or engagements requiring an expanded query set are scoped individually with a fixed-fee proposal before work begins. There are no variable charges based on what the audit finds — you know the full investment at the start.
What happens after the audit is delivered?
You receive the complete deliverable package: the page-by-page citation scorecard, the query-to-page map, the competitor citation comparison report, the uncited page analysis, the content gap register, and the prioritised opportunity roadmap. From there, you have three options. You can take the roadmap directly to your internal team and implement using the detailed guidance provided — the roadmap is written to be actionable without additional interpretation. You can engage Ignited Nepal to implement the roadmap through our content development and technical AEO services. Or you can use the audit as a citation baseline and schedule a re-test in three to six months to measure how your citation rate has changed across the full page set. The audit is a complete, standalone deliverable. No ongoing retainer is required to make full use of it.
