We Crawled a Site With a Healthy SEO Score. Its AEO Score Was 13

Published 2026-07-15 · 6 min read · by the isaeo team

The numbers

We ran isaeo's crawler over a 25-page public test site. Every number in this post came from running isaeo's own crawler — the same engine behind the audits in the product.

Read the top two rows together. By classic SEO standards this site is in reasonable shape — 83 is a passing grade. By answer-engine standards it barely registers.

Why the gap opens

The SEO health score asks: is anything broken? No missing titles, no missing H1s, no 404s, no noindex tags. On those questions the site does well, and the score reflects it.

The AEO score asks a different question: is there anything here worth quoting, and can a machine tell what it is? On that, the same site has almost nothing to offer. Zero pages carry structured data, so nothing declares itself as an Article, an FAQ or a How-To. And 24 of 25 pages fall under 200 words — there is no substantive passage to extract even if an engine wanted one.

This is the core insight: the absence of problems is not the presence of value. SEO scoring is largely subtractive — start at 100, deduct for faults. AEO scoring is additive — start at zero, earn points for signals you actually provide. A site can be flawless and empty at the same time.

What this means for your site

If you have never measured AEO, assume your gap is wider than you'd guess. The traits AEO rewards — schema, question headings, quotable lead passages — are ones most sites never had a reason to add, because nothing scored them before.

The good news is that the fixes are unusually cheap. Adding FAQPage schema to a page that already answers questions is a copy-paste job. Writing a 50-word answer under your H1 takes ten minutes. These are not six-month content programmes.

Closing the gap

1. Measure first. Crawl the site and get both numbers. A gap you can't see is a gap you won't fix.
2. Fix the thin pages. 24 of 25 pages under 200 words is a content problem wearing a technical costume — how few words is too few.
3. Add structured data to your highest-traffic templates — which types matter.
4. Re-crawl and compare. Change tracking shows whether the score actually moved — what to look at after a re-crawl.

Then repeat monthly. The sites that win citations are the ones that treat AEO as a standing metric, not a one-off project — which is exactly what a monthly audit workflow is for.