Open Source · Free · No API Keys Required

Make Your Content
Visible to AI

Three tools that audit and improve how AI assistants see your website. One URL in, complete diagnosis out. Built for businesses that want to understand their AI presence, not game it.

Get Started View on GitHub
Understanding the shift

What is Answer Engine Optimization?

AI assistants are changing how people find businesses. AEO is how you make sure yours gets found.

SEO Gets You on the List

Traditional SEO optimizes for search engines that return a list of links. You compete for position on a page of ten results. The user clicks through and reads your site.

AEO Makes You the Answer

AEO optimizes for AI assistants that return a direct answer. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question in your industry, AEO determines whether the AI cites your business or skips it entirely.

It's About Citability, Not Tricks

AEO isn't about gaming algorithms. It's about making your real expertise accessible to AI systems: structured data they can parse, content specific enough to cite, and technical access they can navigate.

Most Businesses Don't Know Their Score

You probably know your Google ranking. Do you know whether AI assistants can even read your site? Most businesses have never checked. This toolkit gives you that baseline in under a minute.

The Toolkit

Three Tools, One Mission

Each tool works standalone. Together they give you a complete picture of your AI visibility.

Dimension Max Score What It Measures
AI Crawler Access 25 robots.txt, llms.txt, sitemap, bot policies
Structured Data 30 JSON-LD, @graph, schema types, OG tags
Content Citability 25 Heading hierarchy, word count, Q&A patterns
Entity & Authority 20 Author schema, social links, brand consistency

AEO Pipeline

The full scan. Enter a URL, get an interactive dashboard with technical visibility, content quality, and agent readiness scores. Side-by-side view with your site, downloadable report, and plain-language explanations of every signal.

No API keys needed

AI Visibility Audit

Checks what AI crawlers see when they visit your site: robots.txt rules, llms.txt files, structured data, schema markup, content structure, and entity signals. Returns a 0-100 score with copy-paste fix recommendations.

Technical depth

Content Quality Engine

Analyzes your writing against five signals AI assistants use when deciding what to cite: sentence variation, vocabulary specificity, hedging density, structural variety, and concrete detail. Works on files or URLs.

Content analysis
Get Started in 60 Seconds

Quick Start

Python 3.10+ required. No pip install needed for the core audit.

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/patrickboxfordpartners/rote-playoffs.git
cd rote-playoffs

# Run the full AI readiness scan on any URL
python3 -m aeo_pipeline yoursite.com

# That's it. A dashboard opens in your browser.

# Optional: enable multi-agent mode for LLM-generated insights
pip install firecrawl-py
export FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=fc-...
python3 -m aeo_pipeline yoursite.com --agents

# Run as a Rote Play (hackathon registry)
rote play run aeo-pipeline 'url=yoursite.com'
Common Questions

FAQ

Everything you need to know about AEO and this toolkit, in plain language.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps your website rank in traditional search results — the list of blue links on Google. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) helps your content get cited by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. When someone asks an AI a question about your industry, AEO is what determines whether the AI references your business or your competitor. They solve different problems: SEO gets you on the list, AEO makes you the answer.
AI assistants now influence buying decisions for millions of people. When a potential customer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a recommendation in your industry, those systems pull from websites they can read and understand. If your site isn't optimized for AI crawlers, your business is invisible to this growing audience. This isn't about gaming the system — it's about making sure your legitimate expertise is accessible to the tools people are already using.
You need to be comfortable running a command in a terminal, but that's it. The toolkit is one command: type your URL, and it opens a visual dashboard in your browser with scores, explanations, and specific recommendations. Every recommendation includes plain-language context explaining why it matters and what to do about it. No coding required to understand or act on the results.
The AI Readiness Score is a 0–100 grade combining three dimensions. Technical Visibility checks whether AI crawlers can access your site, find structured data, and read your content. Content Quality measures whether your writing style is the kind AI assistants prefer to cite — specific, concrete, and authoritative rather than vague or templated. Agent Readiness checks whether AI agents (not just chatbots) can interact with your site. A score above 70 means you're in good shape. Below 50 means AI assistants are likely skipping over your content.
The dashboard gives you a prioritized list of specific actions ranked by impact. Common improvements include adding structured data (JSON-LD schema markup) so AI can understand what your business does, creating an llms.txt file that tells AI crawlers what's on your site, improving content specificity by replacing vague claims with concrete numbers and examples, and adding FAQ sections with direct answers to common questions. Each recommendation includes copy-paste code when applicable.
No. The core audit runs entirely on your machine using Python standard library — no data leaves your computer. It fetches your public website the same way any browser would, scores it locally, and shows you the results. If you enable the optional multi-agent mode with API keys, those queries go to the respective API providers (Firecrawl, OpenAI, or Anthropic) under their standard terms, but the toolkit itself stores nothing remotely.
The content quality engine analyzes five signals that determine whether AI assistants will cite your writing. Burstiness measures sentence length variation — real writers naturally mix short and long sentences. Vocabulary checks for overused filler words that signal templated content. Hedging detects weak qualifiers — AI prefers definitive statements. Monotony measures repetitive paragraph structure. Specificity looks for concrete details like numbers, names, and data points that make content worth citing.
Run a baseline audit now to understand where you stand. After that, run it again whenever you make significant content or technical changes to your site — new pages, redesigns, CMS migrations, or content rewrites. For businesses actively working on their AI visibility, a monthly check keeps you on track. The multi-agent mode can track changes between scans so you can see whether your improvements are working.
Yes. The toolkit audits any public URL regardless of what platform or CMS you use — WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, custom-built, or anything else. It reads your site the same way AI crawlers do and tells you what they see. The recommendations work with any platform, though some (like adding JSON-LD markup) may be easier on certain CMSes than others.
Agent readiness is the next frontier beyond basic AI visibility. Today's AI chatbots read your site passively. Tomorrow's AI agents will try to interact with it — booking appointments, checking inventory, comparing prices, filling out forms. Agent readiness measures whether your site is prepared for that shift: does it have discoverable API endpoints, proper authentication flows, structured responses, and machine-readable interfaces? Businesses that score well on agent readiness now will have a significant advantage as AI agents become mainstream.
AEO in Practice

Wait, why is this on a subdomain?

Good question. And the answer is a live demonstration of what this toolkit measures and the tradeoffs it forces you to think about.

The primary AEO Toolkit page lives at boxfordpartners.com/tools/aeo — a subdirectory, not a subdomain. That's intentional. Search engines and AI crawlers treat subdomains as separate websites. Every backlink to that subdirectory page strengthens the entire boxfordpartners.com domain. The FAQ schema, the SoftwareApplication structured data, the backlinks from GitHub — all of it consolidates under one domain authority.

So why does aeo.boxfordpartners.com exist? Because we ate our own dog food. We ran this toolkit on our own GitHub Pages site and scored 62 out of 100. The audit told us exactly what to fix: add @graph schema, OG tags, breadcrumbs, author markup, structured content. We followed every recommendation and pushed the score to 86.

But 14 points were stuck. GitHub Pages project sites serve from a subdirectory path, so robots.txt, llms.txt, and sitemap.xml couldn't be found at the domain root where AI crawlers expect them. Moving to a custom subdomain put those files at the root and unlocked the remaining points. The subdomain tradeoff was worth it — this page's job is to demonstrate the toolkit's scoring, not to accumulate link equity. The primary authority page at boxfordpartners.com/tools/aeo still handles that.

The two pages serve different purposes and link to each other. The subdirectory page builds domain authority. The subdomain page proves the toolkit works with a real before-and-after case study. That's not a contradiction — it's exactly the kind of structural decision the audit helps you make.

This is what AEO looks like in practice. Not tricks. Not one-size-fits-all rules. Understanding the tradeoffs, measuring the results, and making the choice that fits your goal. That's what the toolkit measures, and it's what we do for every client at Boxford Partners.

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