In one sentence
A technical AEO audit checks whether AI crawlers can reach, render and correctly interpret a site's pages: crawler access rules, server-rendered content, heading structure, structured data, canonical and language signals, and page freshness.
The single most common failure is the simplest: a robots.txt that blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended, often added years ago as a blanket defensive measure and never revisited.
The second most common is content that only exists after JavaScript runs. Several AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, so a page that looks complete in a browser can be functionally empty to them.
Related terms