The AEO audit checklist you can run on any store

Whether you are checking your own store or auditing a client's, an AEO review comes down to a few concrete questions. Here is a checklist you can run on any store, grouped so you can hand the results to a client without a lecture on schema.

1. Structured data

• Does every product page have a valid Product block in JSON-LD?
• Are the required fields present: name, image, and an offers object with price and priceCurrency?
• Is there exactly one Product block per page, or are the theme, WooCommerce core and an SEO plugin each emitting one that disagrees?

Duplicate, conflicting schema is one of the most common failures. One source of truth wins.

2. Identifiers

• Does each product carry a real brand?
• Is there a GTIN where one exists, using the most specific format available?
• Where there is no GTIN, is mpn used instead?
• Are any GTINs invented or clearly wrong? A wrong identifier is worse than a missing one.

3. Offer clarity

• Is price stated as a number with a currency, not just visible text?
• Is availability set to a real schema.org value (InStock, OutOfStock, PreOrder and so on), not a sentence?
• Are shipping and return policy declared in structured data? Assistants read these as trust signals.

4. Feeds

• Is there a structured product feed, and is it kept in sync as the catalog changes?
• Does the feed agree with the on-page data, or do they contradict each other?

5. Crawler access (the one people get wrong)

This is where audits often go sideways. AI crawlers split into two jobs, and they are different levers:

• Training crawlers (for example GPTBot, ClaudeBot). Blocking these is a content-rights choice. It does not remove you from AI answers.
• Retrieval crawlers (for example OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot). These build the indexes assistants cite from. Block these and you disappear from those assistants' answers.

So check the robots rules with the right question: are the retrieval crawlers allowed to read the pages you want cited? Blocking a training bot to protect your content is fine. Accidentally blocking a retrieval bot is how a store goes invisible.

6. Content shape

• Do key pages answer the question directly up top, with detail below?
• Is there an FAQ with real questions and clean answers a model can lift?

Turn the checklist into a score

Going item by item across a whole catalog by hand is slow. Paste your store address or one product page into the free scan for a quick 0 to 100 read of a sample of your products, or connect the store for a catalog audit with the issues listed per product. On paid plans, Deep Scan then checks the live pages and gives you a report to hand a client. Try the free store check. If you are doing this for clients, see how the Agency plan covers up to fifteen stores from one dashboard, and read how agencies sell AEO.