# AEO audit Human Guide

## What This Is For
Evaluate the brand's visibility and accuracy across AI answer engines. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for AEO audit: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the AEO audit agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for AEO audit.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the AEO audit guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- **Brand name**: The brand to audit
- **Website URL**: Primary domain
- **Key queries**: 5-10 queries a potential customer might ask that should surface the brand
- **Competitors**: 2-3 competitors for comparison
- **Product/service categories**: What the brand should be known for
- Define a test query set: branded queries, category queries, comparison queries, "best of" queries, problem-solution queries
- Analyze how the brand appears in AI responses for each query type
- Check citation accuracy: Are facts correct? Are URLs valid? Is the description current?
- Compare brand mention frequency and sentiment against competitors
- Assess source authority: Which sources are AI engines pulling brand info from?
- Evaluate structured data and knowledge panel presence
- Identify content gaps where the brand should appear but does not

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: Purpose, Input Required, Process, Output, Numbered output convention, Quality scorecard, AI-visibility scoring standard (canonical — reused across the plugin), Chain handoffs, Tips & caveats, Agents Used.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- The user must provide (or will be prompted for):
- This skill defines the plugin's **single AI-visibility scoring standard.** Every AI-visibility surface reuses it — do not invent a parallel model.
- **Don't probe more than 25 queries per session.** Beyond that, model rate limits + token cost dominate. Pick the 10-25 highest-value queries.
- **Citation accuracy is the audit's most-skipped step.** AI engines confidently hallucinate brand facts; if you don't fact-check, you're certifying wrong info. Always check at least the top-cited fact per platform.
- **Score the probe results, don't average platforms.** A brand can score 9/10 on Perplexity (cites everyone) and 2/10 on ChatGPT (selective citing) — the average misleads. Report per-platform scores side by side.
- | **Penalty Range** | Up to EUR 20 million or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher. Supervisory authorities may also issue warnings, bans on processing, and orders to erase data. |
- **Treat the carve-out as conditional, not a free pass.** "Human-reviewed" requires named accountability. Don't claim editorial responsibility unless a named editor is willing to be on the record.
- | **Consent Model** | Opt-out. No prior consent required to send commercial email. Recipients must be given a clear way to opt out, and opt-out requests must be honored within 10 business days. |

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the AEO audit human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the indranilbanerjee/digital-marketing-pro skill entry for `aeo-audit`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

# /digital-marketing-pro:aeo-audit

## Purpose

Evaluate the brand's visibility and accuracy across AI answer engines. Analyze how the brand is cited, described, and recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity, **Google AI Mode** (the conversational search surface that became Google's default at I/O 2026 — ~1B MAUs as of May 2026), Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Produce optimization recommendations to improve AI visibility.

**AI Mode vs AI Overviews — why both matter:** AI Overviews are the summary block at the top of a classic Google SERP and trigger on a subset of queries. AI Mode is a conversational tab (and now the default search experience for opted-in users) backed by Gemini 3.5 Flash with deeper reasoning, follow-ups, and a different citation pattern. The two surfaces select different sources for the same query in a large share of cases (internal observation, 05/2026 — "40–60%" is a rough estimate; re-verify against your own probe set). Audit both.

**Cross-reference with GSC AI Performance Report (rolled out 3 June 2026):** The Google Search Console AI Performance Report (UK rollout first, global to follow) gives you actual *impressions* in AI Overviews + AI Mode for verified properties. Synthetic probe results from this skill should be reconciled against GSC actuals — see `/digital-marketing-pro:gsc-ai-performance` for the workflow. Important caveat: the GSC report intentionally excludes click data; click-through attribution must come from GA4 (the new `AI Assistant` channel group, added 13 May 2026, captures `Medium=ai-assistant` referrals from ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude; see `/digital-marketing-pro:analytics-insights`).

**Google's official position on AI optimization** (Google AI Optimization Guide, updated 15 May 2026): no `llms.txt`, no AI-specific schema, no separate AI eligibility gate. Pages eligible for snippets in classic Search are eligible for AI Features. Don't manufacture work around fictional ranking factors — `/digital-marketing-pro:aeo-geo` documents what *does* work (entity consistency, citation-worthy snippets, knowledge graph alignment).

**Information Agents (Google AI Pro / Ultra, summer 2026 launch):** Google announced at I/O 2026 a new class of persistent agents that continuously monitor web / news / real-time data for subscribers and deliver synthesized updates with actionable capabilities. Once these go live, they become a **7th probe target** for this skill (alongside ChatGPT / Perplexity / AI Mode / AI Overviews / Gemini / Copilot). Until then, treat AI Mode as the proxy — agents are powered by the same Gemini 3.5 Flash backbone. Source: [blog.google/search-io-2026](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026/).

## Input Required

The user must provide (or will be prompted for):

- **Brand name**: The brand to audit
- **Website URL**: Primary domain
- **Key queries**: 5-10 queries a potential customer might ask that should surface the brand
- **Competitors**: 2-3 competitors for comparison
- **Product/service categories**: What the brand should be known for

## Process

1. **Load brand context**: Read `~/.claude-marketing/brands/_active-brand.json` for the active slug, then load `~/.claude-marketing/brands/{slug}/profile.json`. Apply brand voice, compliance rules for target markets (`skills/context-engine/compliance-rules.md`), and industry context. **Also check for guidelines** at `~/.claude-marketing/brands/{slug}/guidelines/_manifest.json` — if present, load restrictions and relevant category files. Check for custom templates at `~/.claude-marketing/brands/{slug}/templates/`. Check for agency SOPs at `~/.claude-marketing/sops/`. If no brand exists, ask: "Set up a brand first (/digital-marketing-pro:brand-setup)?" — or proceed with defaults.
2. Define a test query set: branded queries, category queries, comparison queries, "best of" queries, problem-solution queries
3. Analyze how the brand appears in AI responses for each query type
4. Check citation accuracy: Are facts correct? Are URLs valid? Is the description current?
5. Compare brand mention frequency and sentiment against competitors
6. Assess source authority: Which sources are AI engines pulling brand info from?
7. Evaluate structured data and knowledge panel presence
8. Identify content gaps where the brand should appear but does not
9. Generate optimization recommendations for improved AI visibility

## Output

A structured AEO audit report containing:

- AI visibility scorecard across platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot)
- Query-by-query results showing where the brand appears, how it is described, and citation sources
- Competitor comparison matrix for AI visibility
- Citation accuracy assessment with corrections needed
- Source authority analysis — which pages/sites drive AI mentions
- Content gap list — queries where the brand is absent but should appear
- Optimization playbook: structured data, content strategy, authority building, and entity optimization

## Numbered output convention

All AEO audit outputs go to `${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA}/{brand}/seo/aeo-audit/{YYYY-MM-DD}/`:

```
00-input.md                 brand identity, target query set, competitor list, AI platforms probed
01-query-set.md             the 10-25 queries probed, with intent classification
02-probe-results.json       raw probe responses per platform per query (the data layer)
03-platform-scorecard.md    visibility scorecard per AI platform (1-10) with diff vs prior run
04-citation-accuracy.md     fact-by-fact accuracy check of AI descriptions; what to correct
05-source-authority.md      which pages/sites are driving AI mentions; topical entity map
06-content-gaps.md          queries where brand is absent but should appear
07-competitor-matrix.md     side-by-side AI presence vs competitors
08-quality-scorecard.md     the gates below
09-optimization-playbook.md  structured data, content, authority, entity work — sequenced
PLAN.md                     single-page deliverable
```

Reconcile `03-platform-scorecard.md` against `/digital-marketing-pro:gsc-ai-performance` actuals — probe results show what AI *could* surface; GSC shows what it *actually* surfaced.

## Quality scorecard

| Gate | What it checks |
|---|---|
| **query_set_size** | ≥ 10 queries probed (below this, results are anecdotal) |
| **platform_coverage** | ≥ 4 of the 6 supported platforms probed (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot) |
| **competitor_coverage** | ≥ 2 competitors probed alongside the brand on same query set |
| **citation_accuracy_done** | Every "brand appears" result has been fact-checked (no silent ship of "AI said X — sounds right") |

`status: ready` requires all four gates pass.

## AI-visibility scoring standard (canonical — reused across the plugin)