Answer-Engine Readiness Audit + Citation Plan

Degree of freedom: HIGH — crawl access, extractability, authority levers, plan. Stay plan-only. No robots.txt, schema, or copy edits until approved.

This skill vs neighbors

Role: Senior growth engineer + content strategist (AEO/GEO lens).

Task: Confirm AI crawler access first, audit content extractability and authority levers per key page, phase remediations, emit plan-aeo-readiness.md. Audit & plan only — no robots.txt, schema, or copy edits until approved.

Find why AI engines don't cite you. Plan the fix. Change nothing until approved.

How to reason (every plan item)

1. Propose — unblock a bot, SSR/expose, schema, or authority lever
2. Risk — engines never see the page, or they see it and have nothing to cite
3. Keep-working — pages already answer-first with valid schema
4. Phase — Unblock → Structure → Authority → Entity-measure (do not execute)

Worked example

Propose: allow GPTBot/PerplexityBot in robots.txt; add an FAQ JSON-LD block on /pricing. Risk: Cloudflare default blocks AI bots — citation frequency is zero until access exists. Keep-working: /docs is SSR and already direct-answer-first. Phase: Phase 1 — Unblock & expose. Lever: access before schema; do not promise a rank.

Ranking #1 on Google no longer buys an AI citation. Overlap between top Google links and AI-cited sources has dropped from ~70% to below 20%. LLM-referred visitors convert markedly better than classic search traffic (~4.4x in one 2026 analysis).

This skill targets LLM citation — distinct from SERP rank (enhance-web-seo).

When this fires

Trigger phrases: "do AI engines cite me", "AEO", "GEO", "answer engine optimization", "show up in ChatGPT/Perplexity", "AI search visibility", "llms.txt", "am I blocking AI crawlers".

Do not fire for: classic Google ranking or Core Web Vitals alone (enhance-web-seo). For Google AI Overviews, classic ranking is still often a prerequisite — note and hand that layer to enhance-web-seo.

The audit [HIGH freedom]

A · Can AI even read the site?

• robots.txt — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and each engine's other current crawler tokens allowed? Check the engines' published token lists; the set changes.
• CDN / Cloudflare — AI-bot blocking can be on by default; if the site sits behind a CDN, confirm bot access with a live fetch.
• SSR vs JS-hidden — content behind client JS/login/paywall can't be cited.
• llms.txt — present? Recommend describing site structure for AI systems.

B · Extractable & answer-shaped?

• Direct-answer-first — concise answer before context.
• Heading hierarchy — H1→H2→H3, one topic per section.
• Schema markup — FAQ, HowTo, Product, Review, Speakable JSON-LD valid.
• Sub-query coverage — answers likely fan-out sub-questions.

C · Citable / authoritative? (Princeton GEO levers)

• Expert quotes / attribution (~+41% citation probability).
• Statistics & data (~+30%).
• Inline citations to authoritative sources (~+30%).
• No keyword stuffing (~-9%); hand AI-slop copy to plan-antislop.

D · Entity & consensus (advisory)

• Brand consistency across crawled sources; platform presence gaps. Note only.

E · Measurability

• Baseline citation monitoring across engines recommended.

Procedure [HIGH freedom — plan only]

1. Crawl-access first (A) — blocked bots = finding #1.
2. Audit content shape & authority (B, C) per key page.
3. Note entity/measurability (D, E).
4. Score by impact × effort.
5. Emit `plan-aeo-readiness.md`, then end the turn with a standalone recap in chat: the two or three highest-impact findings and the first phase to approve. The file is the deliverable — write it before the recap.

Guardrails

• Plan only. No robots.txt, schema, or copy edits.
• Access before optimization.
• Don't promise rankings — frame as citation frequency, not fixed rank.
• Authenticity over gaming — real expertise, not manufactured quote-stuffing.
• Cross-hand copy to plan-antislop.

Self-critique before the burndown [LOW freedom — do not skip]

1. evidenced-not-assumed — robots/CDN/SSR checked on real URLs, not assumed open
2. plan-only — no robots.txt, schema, or copy edits
3. severity/phase justified — blocked bots are finding #1, not buried under schema polish
4. right-owner — classic meta/sitemap/OG → enhance-web-seo; slop copy → plan-antislop
5. no-false-safety — do not promise rankings; citation frequency only; no manufactured quote-stuffing

Report template — plan-aeo-readiness.md

# Answer-Engine Readiness Audit — <site>

_Audit-only. Nothing changes until each phase is approved._

## Scope
- Pages/routes audited: …  | Behind Cloudflare/CDN: ☐

## Verdict
| Area | Status | Worst gap |
|------|--------|-----------|
| AI crawler access | ❌ | GPTBot blocked |
| Content extractability | partial | answers buried |
| Authority levers | weak | no stats/quotes |

## Findings
| # | Page | Gap | Lever | Sev | Direction |
|---|------|-----|-------|-----|-----------|

## Phased burndown
- **Phase 1 — Unblock & expose** → `enhance-web-seo` — robots, CDN, SSR, llms.txt
- **Phase 2 — Structure & schema** → `enhance-web-seo` — direct-answer-first, JSON-LD
- **Phase 3 — Authority levers** → `docs-writer` — stats, quotes, citations
- **Phase 4 — Entity/measure (advisory)** → off-site + monitoring baseline

## Execution handoff
Set citation-monitoring baseline before/after so improvement is measured.

Chains with

• Launch gates loop — growth/discoverability; run alongside plan-mobile-readiness.
• `enhance-web-seo` — classic ranking underpins AI Overviews.
• `plan-antislop` — generic copy suppresses citation.
• Execution: enhance-web-seo, docs-writer, enhance-web-landing.
• Verify: prompt-test target queries across engines before/after.

Plan at high effort. Execute after approval at the default effort under approved-plan-execution.mdc (no reward hacking, no feature deletion).