What is AEO and how is it different from SEO?

SEO optimizes your ranking in a list of links. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) optimizes your content to be cited directly in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The key signals are different: structured data, clear question-and-answer formatting, and unambiguous headings matter more than backlinks.

Which AI search engines does AEOify target?

AEOify targets ChatGPT web search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot. These AI engines crawl your site, evaluate your content for clarity and trustworthiness, and decide whether to cite it in their responses. Our recommendations address the shared signals that influence all four platforms.

How does AEOify actually crawl my site?

AEOify loads each page in a real browser with JavaScript fully executed, just like AI crawlers do. We then extract titles, meta descriptions, headings, structured data, and Open Graph tags. Everything is evaluated against current AEO best practices using a two-layer AI analysis.

How many pages does it analyze?

A smart scan starts from your URL, follows internal links, and auto-discovers your key pages including your homepage, about page, and top content pages. You can also choose a single-page scan to analyze one specific URL. Each page receives its own set of prioritized recommendations.

What does a recommendation actually look like?

Each recommendation includes a title, a description of the issue, a priority score, two to four action steps, and a code snippet where applicable. For example, a missing FAQ schema recommendation provides ready-to-paste JSON-LD markup. Recommendations are sorted by impact so you fix what matters first.

How long does analysis take?

A smart scan typically completes in two to five minutes. Single-page scans finish in under one minute. You paste your URL, and AEOify handles the rest automatically. You receive an email notification as soon as your report is ready to review.

Can I share my report?

Yes. Every AEOify report gets a unique shareable URL. Anyone with the link can view the full report including all recommendations and code snippets, with no account required. This makes it easy to share results with developers, clients, or team members.

Do I need technical knowledge to act on the recommendations?

No. Quick-win recommendations are designed for anyone who can edit a webpage. Structured data and schema markup recommendations include ready-to-use code you can copy and paste. For more involved changes like content restructuring, basic familiarity with your CMS or a developer helps.

Allowing our crawler

How to whitelist the AEOify scanner so it can access your site for accurate results.

Last updated: 2026-03-09

Why you might need this

AEOify uses a real Chromium browser to render your pages — the same way AI search engines like Google AI Overviews and Perplexity crawl your site. Some Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) and CDN services may block automated browsers, which can result in incomplete or inaccurate scan results.

If your report shows unusually low scores or mentions a "Verifying your connection" page, your WAF is likely blocking our crawler.

How to identify our crawler

Our crawler sends a standard Chrome user-agent with an AEOifyBot identifier appended:

AEOifyBot/1.0 (+https://aeoify.ai/help/allowing-our-crawler)

The full user-agent string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 AEOifyBot/1.0 (+https://aeoify.ai/help/allowing-our-crawler)

You can whitelist the crawler by either:

User-agent string — match on the AEOifyBot substring
IP address — all requests originate from a single static IP (contact support@aeoify.ai for the current address)

Cloudflare

Most sites behind Cloudflare can allow our crawler with a single WAF rule:

Log in to your Cloudflare dashboard
Select your domain
Go to Security > WAF > Custom rules
Click Create rule
Set the rule name to Allow AEOifyBot
Under When incoming requests match, choose:
- Field: User Agent
- Operator: contains
- Value: AEOifyBot
Set Then take action to Skip > check All remaining custom rules
Click Deploy

The crawler should now pass through on your next scan.

Shopify stores

Shopify uses Cloudflare by default for all stores. If your Shopify site is blocking our crawler, follow the Cloudflare steps above using your Cloudflare dashboard. If you do not have a Cloudflare account (Shopify manages it for you), you may need to contact Shopify support to whitelist the AEOifyBot user-agent.

Other WAFs

The general approach is the same for any WAF — create a rule that allows requests where the user-agent contains AEOifyBot.

AWS WAF — Add a string match condition on the User-Agent header for AEOifyBot, then create a rule that allows matching requests.
Sucuri — Go to Settings > Whitelist, add the user-agent AEOifyBot.
Wordfence (WordPress) — Go to Firewall > Blocking, add a user-agent pattern allowlist for AEOifyBot.

If your WAF supports IP-based allowlisting and you prefer that approach, contact us at support@aeoify.ai for our static IP address.

Verify it worked

After adding the whitelist rule:

Go to your Dashboard and find the report for your site
Click Rescan to run a fresh evaluation
Compare the new scores against your previous report — if the crawler can now access your pages, you should see more detailed recommendations and potentially different scores

Allowing our crawler

Why you might need this

How to identify our crawler

Cloudflare

Shopify stores

Other WAFs

Verify it worked

Related articles

Reading your AEO report

Recommendation categories

Share your report