Answer Engine Optimization is a formatting discipline more than a content one, and the low scores here reflect how few pages are written with extraction in mind. The underlying content is often perfectly good. It is simply arranged as an essay — context first, conclusion last — when the format that gets extracted is the opposite: the answer first, the reasoning after. Nothing about that requires new research, only rearrangement.
Here is where that sits. The median SeoMods score is 40/100, which ranks it 19 of the 25 tools with a published benchmark by median. The ranking runs over the 25 tools on the main benchmark page; 1st is the highest median. The middle half of results falls between 22 and 49 — a band 27 points wide. That is wide: in this sample sites’ scores diverge markedly on this measure.
How the scores are distributed
An average on its own misleads. The chart below splits all 5,154 scans into five score bands, totalling 100%. The spread is wide and fairly even: in this sample sites land at very different levels on this measure.
- 0–19
- 20–39
- 40–59
- 60–79
- 80–100
| Score band | AEO |
|---|---|
| 0–19 | 25% · 1,270 |
| 20–39 | 24% · 1,252 |
| 40–59 | 40% · 2,082 |
| 60–79 | 10% · 499 |
| 80–100 | 1% · 51 |
| Total runs | 5,154 |
The grade mix
The same data as letters: A+ 95–100, A 85–94, B 75–84, C 65–74, D 50–64 and F below 50.
Where does my score sit?
This score responds faster to editing than almost anything else in the dataset, because everything it measures is structural. Moving a conclusion above its explanation, splitting a long paragraph, phrasing a heading as the question it answers — each of those is minutes of work and each moves the number. Treat a low score as a formatting backlog rather than a content verdict.
| Tool | P10 | P25 | Median | P75 | P90 | Mean | Lowest | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AEO | 0 | 22 | 40 | 49 | 62 | 34.7 | 0 | 100 |
A score from the AEO Checker (Answer Engine Optimization) can be read against the five values below. All of them are calculated from the scans in this benchmark: they place a SeoMods score within this sample, not in Google’s results.
| Percentile | Score | What it means for a score |
|---|---|---|
| P10 | 0 | About one scan in ten scored 0 or lower. Below it, a page is in the lowest tenth of this sample. |
| P25 | 22 | The edge of the bottom quarter. A score under 22 is below about three quarters of the scans. |
| Median | 40 | The middle of the sample: half the scans scored lower, half higher. A score of 40 is the typical result here. |
| P75 | 49 | Where the top quarter begins. A score of 49 or more is at or above about three quarters of the scans. |
| P90 | 62 | Where the top tenth begins. A score of 62 or more is among the highest 10% of scans in this sample. |
Percentiles describe the sites SeoMods scanned, not the whole web, and they apply to this tool only: the same number on another tool sits somewhere else.
The SeoMods checks most often unmet
The checks are all asking whether a machine could find the boundaries of an answer. A heading that states the question marks where the answer begins; a short paragraph immediately underneath marks where it ends; a list or table makes a set of items machine-countable. Without those boundaries an engine has to guess where the answer stops, and a cautious guess may mean the page is not used.
| Check | Not met (share of scans) | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| FAQPage / QAPage schema | 96% | Hard fail |
| TL;DR / quick answer block | 91% | Partial |
| Tables / definition lists | 90% | Partial |
| Direct answer right after the question | 87% | Hard fail |
| Question-style headings | 75% | Hard fail |
| Exactly one clear H1 | 47% | Partial |
| Concise, standalone passages | 33% | Partial |
| Uses lists | 30% | Partial |
| HowTo / step structure | 30% | Partial |
| Logical H2/H3 subheadings | 25% | Partial |
The rate is the share of scans in which a SeoMods check was not met. It is SeoMods’ criterion, not Google’s assessment of these pages. “Hard fail” means the check’s full weight is deducted from the SeoMods score; “partial” means part of it.
The weakest areas
This tool groups its checks into categories. The chart below shows how often each category was the lowest-scoring one in a scan — which area is most often the weak link. It is not the average score in that category; it is how often it came last.
“Answer Schema” was the weakest area in 61% of scans.
What to fix first
Add a short summary block near the top of the page: two or three sentences that answer the main question outright, before any preamble. It is the single highest-return change here, it takes ten minutes, and it also helps human readers who arrived from a search result and want to know immediately whether they are in the right place.
A typical scan passes 4.0 of 10 checks and leaves 6.0 open items behind. In this sample what brings a SeoMods score down is mostly not one large omission but accumulated small ones.
Run the AEO Checker (Answer Engine Optimization) on your own page
Month by month
This page adds every published month together. Underneath it, each month is frozen as an edition of its own whose figures are never edited again — which is the only reason two months can be set side by side at all. Below is the AEO Checker (Answer Engine Optimization) across the 2 published editions, with the combined figure in the last row of the table.
Between August 2026 and September 2026 the median held at 40, and the share of scans at 80 or above held at 1%. The two months do not measure the same sites — the September 2026 sample has about 3 times as many sites — so read the gap as a change in the cross-section measured, not as the same sites getting better or worse.
| Edition | Median | vs. previous | Scored 80+ | Issues/run | Runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2026 | 40 | baseline | 1% | 6.2 | 1,448 |
| September 2026 | 40 | no change | 1% | 6.0 | 3,706 |
| All published months, combined | 40 | — | 1% | 6.0 | 5,154 |
Reading a monthly difference. Each month is a separate sample, and its size changes from month to month. A change in sample size can move a median and a distribution by itself, so a monthly difference should not be mistaken for a change in scores: it does not show that sites improved or got worse.
Which checks moved
Each check’s rate in the first edition that measured it, beside its rate in the latest. Moves under two points are marked as no change: these are independent monthly samples of a shifting set of sites, and a difference that small is not evidence that anything on the web changed.
| Check | Not met in August 2026 | Not met in September 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| HowTo / step structure | 36% · August 2026 | 28% · September 2026 | −8 pp |
| Uses lists | 36% · August 2026 | 28% · September 2026 | −8 pp |
| Exactly one clear H1 | 43% · August 2026 | 49% · September 2026 | +6 pp |
| Question-style headings Hard fail | 78% · August 2026 | 73% · September 2026 | −5 pp |
| TL;DR / quick answer block | 94% · August 2026 | 90% · September 2026 | −4 pp |
| Logical H2/H3 subheadings | 28% · August 2026 | 24% · September 2026 | −4 pp |
| Direct answer right after the question Hard fail | 85% · August 2026 | 88% · September 2026 | +3 pp |
| Concise, standalone passages | 32% · August 2026 | 34% · September 2026 | no change |
| Tables / definition lists | 89% · August 2026 | 90% · September 2026 | no change |
| FAQPage / QAPage schema Hard fail | 96% · August 2026 | 96% · September 2026 | no change |
What this score does not measure
- It is not a direct measurement of the signals every AI system uses. Which system uses which signal, and how, is not public; the score measures the checks SeoMods chose.
- It does not measure whether a page is actually cited in AI answers. It measures readiness on the page, not what any assistant returned.
- It is not a Google ranking. A high score does not guarantee a better position, and a low one does not mean Google has penalised the page.
About this benchmark. This benchmark is calculated from data on the sites SeoMods has scanned. The results do not necessarily represent all websites, or a random selection of them. The scores express SeoMods’ own measurement and scoring criteria; they are not ranking, quality, E-E-A-T or AI visibility scores issued by Google. Sample, anonymization and licence: the full methodology.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
Classic SEO works to get the page into the results. AEO works to get the answer out of the page once it is there — so it is concerned with structure, boundaries and extractability rather than with relevance or authority. They are complementary: a page nobody can find gains nothing from being well-formatted, and a findable page that hides its answer in paragraph nine loses the position anyway.
Does FAQ schema still help?
Its role has narrowed: Google restricted FAQ rich results to a small set of site types, so most sites will no longer see the visual treatment in the search result. As machine-readable structure it is still worth having — it states unambiguously which text is a question and which is its answer, which is the kind of boundary this benchmark looks for.
How long should an extractable answer be?
Two to four sentences. Shorter and it usually lacks the qualification that makes it safe to repeat; longer and whatever extracts the answer has to decide where to cut it. Give the direct answer in that space and put the caveats, examples and workings underneath, where they support the answer without being part of it.
What is a good score on the AEO Checker (Answer Engine Optimization)?
In this dataset the median SeoMods score is 40/100, so scoring 40 sits exactly in the middle of the sample. 49 is the start of the upper quartile and 62 or above is the top 10%; below 22 is the bottom quarter. Those thresholds are specific to this tool — the 25 tools with a published benchmark have very different medians, so 70 here and 70 elsewhere do not mean the same thing. They place a page among the sites SeoMods scanned; they say nothing about Google rankings.
Is the score from the AEO Checker (Answer Engine Optimization) issued by Google?
No. It is a benchmark score calculated against the check list SeoMods defined for this tool. A SeoMods check going unmet does not mean Google has penalised the page or ranked it lower.
Which SeoMods check goes unmet most often on the AEO Checker (Answer Engine Optimization)?
“FAQPage / QAPage schema”, which was not met in 96% of scans. The largest losses on the SeoMods score, though, come from the checks scored as hard fails — this tool has 3, the most common being “FAQPage / QAPage schema” at 96%.
Questions that govern the whole series — how the sample is collected, how sites are anonymized, how often the figures are refreshed — are answered in the methodology on the hub.
Using this data
The figures, tables and charts on this page are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; the only condition is a link back to this page. Suggested citation: SeoMods — AEO Checker (Answer Engine Optimization) benchmarks, 2 October 2026, https://seomods.com/seo-score-benchmarks/aeo-checker. If you need to cite by date, use the September 2026 edition instead: this page changes at every refresh and that one never does.