How to check whether AI recommends your site — the honest AEO audit I run for clients

Author: Alex Isa (Webappski). This is the dev-tutorial cut of a longer piece on the Webappski blog — terminal-first, fewer words on the why. If a buyer asks ChatGPT "best CDN providers 2026" and your product is not in the answer, you lose the sale before you ever see the lead. The only honest way to know whether that is happening is to ask the engines the questions your buyers ask and read the raw answers — not trust a single dashboard score. Here is the loop we at Webappski run for a client, with the open-source tool aeo-platform (MIT, zero runtime deps). 1. Install and point it at the client's domain npm install -g aeo-platform cd client-audit && aeo-tracker init init writes a .aeo-tracker.json . The three things that matter: { "brand" : "Northwind CDN" , // illustrative, fictional brand "domain" : "northwind.example" , // registrable domain — subdomains count, spoof hosts don't "engines" : [ "openai" , "gemini" , "anthropic" ], // ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude "queries" : [ "best CDN providers 2026" , "best low-latency video streaming CDN 2026" , "alternatives to the market-leading CDN 2026" ] } The questions ARE the audit. A basket of vanity phrases produces a flattering, useless number; a basket of the buyer's real decision questions produces a number that predicts revenue. Freeze it, so next month's run is comparable. 2. Run it — sampled, not one noisy shot AI answers are non-deterministic: ask the same question twice and you can get a different list. A single pass turns that noise into a fake-precise number. So run each cell several times and let the score carry a confidence interval instead of pretending one shot is the truth: # plain single-shot run aeo-tracker run # sample each cell N times — the score comes back with a Wilson confidence interval aeo-tracker run --samples = 5 With --samples=5 , every (query × engine) cell is queried five times; the headline presence rate is then reported as a Wilson interval, and small samples are flagged as small rather than so