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An AEO audit is a review of where your brand stands in AI answers: how assistants such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity describe you, which competitors they recommend instead, which sources they trust, and what on your site and across the web explains the gap. Curve Compliance helps healthcare brands answer those questions. AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service. With Curve AEO, the managed service, Curve's team turns those insights into action: building your strategy, creating and optimizing content, and tracking progress.
Want to see where your brand stands in AI answers next to the competitors your patients compare you with? Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.
AEO audit, AI visibility audit, SEO audit: what each one answers
| Audit | The question it answers | What it hands you |
|---|---|---|
| SEO audit | Can Google crawl, index and rank your pages? | Technical and ranking fixes for classic search |
| AI visibility audit | Can AI assistants read your site, and what do they say for the questions you test? | A site check and a record of the answers |
| AEO audit | Where does your brand stand in AI answers against competitors, why, and what work will change it? | A brand fact sheet, a competitor map, a baseline and a ranked plan |
A clean SEO audit does not mean assistants will cite you. In Ahrefs' study of 15,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, only 12% of cited links ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt on average; Perplexity was highest at 28.6%, and the other assistants hovered around 8% (Ahrefs). The technical checks still come first, and the AI visibility audit checklist covers crawlers, snippets and page basics in detail. This guide covers the rest: brand, questions, competitors, content and the baseline.
Part 1: Brand. How does AI describe you?
When someone asks AI which healthcare product or provider to choose, does your brand get mentioned? Start with your own name. Ask each assistant what you offer, where, who your clinicians are, which insurance you take and what patients say about you. Record every answer and mark each wrong or out-of-date fact.
This matters because patients act on what they read. Among patients who had used AI to research providers, 66% said they had encountered incorrect provider information from an AI tool, and 60% of AI users said they trusted the summary they received without verifying it (rater8). OpenAI itself tells users that "Search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect" (OpenAI).
Then find where the wrong facts come from. In Yext's study of location-based questions, listings made up 52.61% of healthcare AI citations, which Yext ties to "medical directories, licensing databases, and insurance platforms" (Yext). Google's Business Profile guidelines ask businesses to "Represent your business as it's consistently represented and recognized in the real world across signage, stationery, and other branding," with separate rules for individual practitioners such as doctors (Google). List your name, address, phone, hours, services and providers as they appear on your site, your Business Profile and each directory the answers cite, and flag every mismatch. See what to do when AI gets your practice wrong.
Note how answers describe your reputation, too. In rater8's survey, 75% of patients said 4.0 stars or higher was the lowest rating they would accept before booking, and 44% would not book below 4.5 (rater8). Across 75,000 brands, Ahrefs found branded web mentions correlate highly with AI visibility, at 0.66 to 0.71, though correlation isn't causation (Ahrefs).
Part 2: Demand. Which patient questions matter most?
AI is already part of how patients choose. In rater8's 2026 survey, 47% of patients said they had used an AI tool to research healthcare providers, and among patients who searched for a new doctor, AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude were cited as an influence by 36% of searchers (rater8). KFF found 16% of adults used AI in the past year to help decide whether to see a doctor or seek care, and 58% of adults who used AI for physical health advice later followed up with a doctor or health care provider (KFF).
Build the question set from your front desk, your search data and your service lines, then group it by intent. Intent changes how often Google answers with AI: in WebFX's health data, AI Overviews appeared on 66.9% of informational searches, 45.4% of commercial, 35.3% of transactional and 14.1% of navigational ones (WebFX). A practical set covers five groups:
- Brand. Questions that name you, such as whether you take a given insurance plan or see new patients.
- Local. Questions with a place in them, written the way patients ask: 55% of patients searching for a new doctor start with some version of "specialty near me" (rater8).
- Service. What a service involves, who it suits and what to expect at a first visit.
- Comparison. You against a named competitor, or one option against another.
- Informational. The broader health questions where publishers usually lead, and where a clinician-reviewed page can still add what only you know.
Weight the questions closest to a booking. A gap on a local or comparison question can matter more than several gaps on general topics.
Part 3: Competitors. Who gets named instead?
For each question, record which brands every answer names and which pages it cites. Three numbers summarize it: mention rate (how often AI answers name you), citation rate (how often they cite your site) and share of voice (your share of the mentions among the brands you compete with). AI answers are selective. SOCi found ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of brand locations, compared to an average 35.9% appearance rate in Google's local 3-Pack, across more than 350,000 locations of 2,751 multi-location brands across industries (SOCi).
Separate publishers from true competitors. In Conductor's health care data, mayoclinic.org (6.58%) and clevelandclinic.org (4.90%) lead AI citations in health care equipment and services (Conductor). A national health publisher cited on a general question is a source to learn from; a practice nearby named on "best orthopedic surgeon near me" is a competitor to beat. Your AI competitors may also differ from your Google competitors, given how little AI citations overlap with the top 10.
Then ask why each competitor wins. Open the page an answer cites and compare it with yours: does it answer the question in the first lines, cite sources, show a named clinician, list locations and insurance in text, and look current? See why AI recommends your competitor and AI share of voice.
Part 4: Site and content. Is there something worth citing?
First confirm the gate is open. Google says "To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet" (Google). The AI visibility audit checklist covers the rest of the technical review.
Then map each priority question to the page that should answer it, and mark the ones with no page, a thin page or an outdated one. Google's guide puts that work first: "Creating content that people find unique, compelling, and useful will likely influence your website's presence in generative AI search in the long run more than any of the other suggestions in this guide" (Google). Ahrefs found AI assistants cite URLs that are 25.7% fresher on average than Google's organic results (Ahrefs), so note the last real update on each key page. See AEO content for healthcare and how to optimize a healthcare website for AI search.
Part 5: Baseline. Measure before you change anything
One round of answers is not a baseline. Ahrefs followed about 37,500 citations for 20 days: 50% to 83% disappeared by the next day, and about 75% of those returned within the 20 days (Ahrefs). Ask the same questions on several days and across assistants before you record your starting point.
Add the traffic view. Conductor found AI referrals were 0.64% of all website traffic in the health care industry, with ChatGPT driving 83.8% of it (Conductor). Seer Interactive reports that a citation in an AI Overview brings 120% more organic clicks per impression than no citation, though still 38% fewer than when no AI Overview appears (Seer). Record AI referral visits by landing page and the bookings they bring. See AEO tracking for healthcare and from AI search traffic to bookings.
What a finished AEO audit should hand you
| Deliverable | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Brand fact sheet | Your correct facts, and each wrong one with the assistant, question and source behind it |
| Listing and profile list | Every directory and profile the answers cite, with mismatches flagged |
| Question set | Patient questions grouped by intent, with the city written in where it matters |
| Competitor map | Who is named for each topic, the pages and sources cited, and why they win |
| Site and content gaps | Technical blocks, plus the questions with no page, a thin page or an old one |
| Baseline | Mention rate, citation rate and share of voice over several days, plus AI visits and bookings |
| Ranked plan | Fixes and pages in order of closeness to a booking, size of the gap and review effort |
Rank the plan with your clinicians in the room. Medical pages need their review, so their time sets the pace. See AEO strategy for healthcare brands.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In one AI Visibility program we've run, for a HIPAA-focused healthcare software brand, Curve's team tracked the questions buyers ask AI assistants, found where competitors were named and the brand wasn't, and published pages to close those gaps. About five weeks in:
- AI assistants named or cited the brand in 53% of their answers to its 40 core buyer questions (104 of 196), across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude.
- Across 184 real buyer questions and 912 AI answers, its site was cited in 236 answers, more than any competitor's and more than 2.5 times as many as the nearest one (89).
- 47 of the new pages were already cited by AI assistants within six days of going live.
- One new page brought in more than half of the brand's unpaid ChatGPT visits in its first week.
How Curve Compliance helps
AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service. In Curve, the feature is called AI Visibility (AEO), and the managed service is Curve AEO. Introducing Curve AEO: a service that helps you understand how your brand appears in AI search, with a team that handles the strategy and execution for you.
What You Get with Curve AEO:
- AI Visibility Tracking. See how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers.
- Optimize Your Site for AI. We make technical improvements that help AI assistants find, read, and understand your content.
- Competitive Insights. Understand who's getting recommended instead of you.
- Content Roadmap. Identify gaps and prioritize opportunities to improve performance.
With the managed service, Curve's team sets up your questions, competitors and topics, writes the pages on your roadmap, and makes the technical fixes that help AI assistants read your site. Your clinicians review and approve anything medical before it goes live. Each month, Curve's team walks you through your results on a call and sends a one-page report.
AI Visibility shows where competitors are named and you aren't, who leads each topic, and which sources AI cites. It catches what AI gets wrong about your practice, so you can correct it on the pages AI reads. It's built for healthcare: only the marketing question you track is sent to AI assistants, screened for PHI first, and never anything about a patient. Curve is SOC 2 Type II and signs a BAA on every plan. See AI Visibility in Curve. AI Visibility is available on request: book a call to get started.
Sources (checked November 6, 2026): rater8, 2026 Patient Choice Report; OpenAI Help Center, Searching the web with ChatGPT; Yext Research, AI Citations, User Locations, & Query Context (October 9, 2025); Google Business Profile Help, Guidelines for representing your business on Google; Ahrefs, Top Brand Visibility Factors (December 12, 2025); KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust (March 25, 2026); WebFX, AI Overviews in Healthcare (September 16, 2025); SOCi, 2026 Local Visibility Index (January 28, 2026); Ahrefs, Only 12% of AI Cited URLs Rank in Google's Top 10 (August 11, 2025); Conductor, Health Care Industry: 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks; Google, AI features and your website; Google, Optimizing your website for generative AI features (July 10, 2026); Ahrefs, AI Assistants Prefer to Cite Fresher Content (July 28, 2025); Ahrefs, How Stable Are AI Citations? (October 29, 2026); Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update (April 24, 2026).
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an AEO audit?
An AEO audit reviews where your brand stands in AI answers: how assistants describe you, which competitors they name instead, which sources they cite, and what on your site and across the web explains the gap. It ends with a baseline and a ranked plan.
How is an AEO audit different from an SEO audit?
An SEO audit asks whether Google can crawl, index and rank you; an AEO audit asks whether AI answers name and cite you. The two diverge: across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, Ahrefs found only 12% of cited links ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt on average (Ahrefs).
How is it different from an AI visibility audit?
The AI visibility audit checks whether AI assistants can read your site and records what they say. An AEO audit adds the brand fact sheet, the competitor map, a baseline and a ranked plan.
Which AI assistants should an AEO audit cover?
ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. ChatGPT matters most for clicks: Conductor found it drives 83.8% of AI referral traffic in health care (Conductor).
How often should you run an AEO audit?
Run a full audit to set your baseline, then keep tracking the same questions. Repeat the full review after a redesign, a platform move, a new location or a new service line.
Can you do an AEO audit by hand?
For a small question set, yes: ask each assistant each question and log the answers in a sheet. Repeat it on several days, because answers and citations change from one day to the next.
Does an AEO audit use patient data?
It should not. An AEO audit works from the marketing questions patients ask, and in Curve Compliance's AI Visibility only the marketing question you track is sent to AI assistants, screened for PHI first, and never anything about a patient.
Can Curve run an AEO audit for us?
Yes. With Curve AEO, Curve's team sets up your questions, competitors and topics, then builds your strategy, creates and optimizes content, and tracks progress.
Talk to Curve Compliance
Want to see your own brand, competitors and questions in AI answers? Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.