The State of AEO 2026

Methodology

This report aggregates results from every PUBLIC + COMPLETED audit run through SeoChatAI. Each audit grades a site against 99 checks across 8 categories — on-page, technical, performance, content, security, social, accessibility, and AI-readiness (AEO). Audits are user-initiated; the corpus is biased toward sites whose owners care enough to audit, which we believe lifts the average above the indexable web baseline.

Time window: 20 mar 2026 → 28 ago 2026 · Sample size: 251 audits

What we found

The average AEO score (44.5) trails the overall score (67.5) by 23.0 points. This is the AEO opportunity: sites are doing better on classic SEO basics than on AI-search visibility, even though AI engines now claim a meaningful share of commercial-intent traffic.

How are scores distributed?

Which checks fail most often?

Each row represents the share of audited sites where this specific check returns a 'fail' status. The pattern reveals which technical and AEO gaps are most prevalent — and most worth fixing.

Which industries score highest?

Use this data

All statistics on this page are computed live from the SeoChatAI public audit corpus and refresh continuously. Journalists, marketers, and writers are encouraged to cite the report directly.

Data is published under CC BY 4.0 — free to use with attribution.