How this works

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is SEO for AI assistants. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews about your church, those tools read your site (or refuse to). This scanner grades how well they can do that.

The four scores

Findable — Crawlability & Access

Can AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, Bytespider, Applebot-Extended) get to your site at all? We check robots.txt, llms.txt, sitemap.xml, HTTPS, response speed, and whether your content is in the HTML or hidden behind JavaScript.

Understandable — Structured Data & Semantics

Once an AI is on your page, does it know what it's looking at? We check for JSON-LD schema (Church / Organization / Event / FAQ), OpenGraph metadata, a single clear H1, canonical URLs, and image alt text.

Quotable — Content Quality for LLMs

This is the AI-judged section. We send your scraped content to an LLM and ask: are the key facts in plain text (not images)? Are paragraphs short and answer-shaped? Is there visible structure? Does it look fresh?

Trustworthy — Authority & Trust

We check for the pages AI tools expect a real church to have: About, Beliefs, Staff/Leadership, Visit, Contact — plus links to social profiles for cross-reference.

Can AI answer this about your church?

We ask an AI model to answer 7 fixed questions (services, location, beliefs, lead pastor, how to visit, kids ministry, giving) plus 2–3 it infers from your content — using only what we scraped from your site. "Couldn't find this" means a visitor asking an AI tool about you would get the same blank.

Pages we scan

Your homepage plus up to 11 key pages we identify automatically — we read every link on your homepage and your sitemap, then match page names like "What Our Church Teaches", "Statement of Faith", "I'm New", "Our Pastor", Sermons, Events, Giving and Contact. Any leftover slots go to your other content pages. We use Firecrawl to scrape, then run deterministic checks for the structural stuff and an LLM for content quality.

Caching & rate limits

We cache results for one hour per URL — re-scanning the same site within an hour just shows you the same report. Each IP can run 3 fresh scans per hour.