Ranked on Google. Invisible to AI.
Meridian Ledger — a fictional six-person bookkeeping SaaS. Ranking respectably on Google for a handful of terms, and quietly losing enquiries they never saw arrive.
Traffic was flat but not falling. Nothing in Search Console looked alarming. The founder's actual worry was harder to name: prospects kept saying they had “asked around” and landed on a competitor, and nobody could point to where that conversation happened.
They ran the free audit on their homepage, mostly to rule the site out as the problem.
Four channels in one pass. SEO from the page markup, AEO from schema and answer-shaped structure, GEO from LLM-readability via Jina Reader plus domain authority via Open PageRank, and Core Web Vitals from live PageSpeed Insights field data — real visitors, not a lab simulation.
✓SEO — 84
Titles, meta, canonicals and internal links all in order
84/100
✕AEO — 31
No FAQ schema, no answer-shaped headings, nothing structured to cite
31/100
*!*GEO — 47
Content readable, but entity signals thin and authority modest
47/100
*!*Core Web Vitals — 62
LCP 3.1s on mobile field data — needs improvement, not failing
62/100
The Radar read the H2 headings on their own page, built the questions a buyer would actually ask an answer engine for each topic, and checked whether Meridian appeared.
For “best bookkeeping software for small agencies” and “how do I switch bookkeeping providers” — both topics they had written pages about — they were not cited, and two competitors were. That was the first concrete evidence of where the “asked around” conversations were going. The report's fix list was ordered by impact rather than by category, so the top three items were all AEO: add FAQPage schema, restructure two pillar pages into question-and-answer form, and add an Organization block with real entity detail.
They handed the report straight to the Search Visibility agent using the one-click handoff, so nothing had to be re-explained in a fresh conversation.
31 → 68 AEO score, illustrative
3 Credits, full report
~2 min To the first finding
The transferable lesson
An SEO score of 84 and an AEO score of 31 is a common shape, and it is invisible in any tool that only measures SEO. If your Google numbers look fine but referrals keep coming from conversations you cannot trace, check whether an answer engine can cite you at all before you touch anything else.