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 is 40/100, which ranks it 19 of the 25 measures in this dataset. The middle half of results falls between 13 and 47 — a band 34 points wide. That is wide: sites genuinely diverge here, which is to say getting ahead is still possible.
How the scores are distributed
An average on its own misleads. The chart below splits all 1,448 scans into five score bands, totalling 100%. The spread is wide and fairly even, which is what a measure looks like while it is still being adopted unevenly.
- 0–19
- 20–39
- 40–59
- 60–79
- 80–100
| Score band | AEO |
|---|---|
| 0–19 | 28% · 404 |
| 20–39 | 20% · 288 |
| 40–59 | 42% · 601 |
| 60–79 | 10% · 142 |
| 80–100 | 1% · 13 |
| Total runs | 1,448 |
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 your score stands
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 | 10th | 25th | Median | 75th | 90th | Mean | Lowest | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AEO | 0 | 13 | 40 | 47 | 62 | 33.5 | 0 | 93 |
How to read it: 13 is bottom-quartile, 40 is a typical page, 47 starts the upper quartile and 62 or above is the top 10%. These thresholds apply to this tool only.
The checks that fail most
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 it usually guesses conservatively — which means not using the page at all.
| Check | Did not pass | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| FAQPage / QAPage schema | 96% | Hard fail |
| TL;DR / quick answer block | 94% | Partial |
| Tables / definition lists | 89% | Partial |
| Direct answer right after the question | 85% | Hard fail |
| Question-style headings | 78% | Hard fail |
| Exactly one clear H1 | 43% | Partial |
| HowTo / step structure | 36% | Partial |
| Uses lists | 36% | Partial |
| Concise, standalone passages | 32% | Partial |
| Logical H2/H3 subheadings | 28% | Partial |
“Hard fail” means the check’s full weighting is lost; “partial” means only part of the score is. Rates are the share of scans in which the check ran and did not pass.
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 3.8 of 10 checks and leaves 6.2 open items behind. What drags a score down is usually not one catastrophe but accumulated small omissions.
Run the AEO Checker (Answer Engine Optimization) on your own page
Month by month
The figures on this page are replaced at every refresh. At the end of each month a permanent edition is published for that month and never edited again — which is the only reason this series can be compared at all. One edition has been published so far; when the second lands this section will set the two months side by side.
| Edition | Median | vs. previous | Scored 80+ | Issues/run | Runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2026 | 40 | baseline | 1% | 6.2 | 1,448 |
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, and that is exactly the boundary an answer engine needs.
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 an engine has to decide where to cut, which it prefers not to do. 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 is 40/100, so scoring 40 puts you exactly in the middle. 47 is the start of the upper quartile and 62 or above is the top 10%; below 13 is the bottom quarter. Those thresholds are specific to this tool — the 25 measures in this dataset have very different medians, so 70 here and 70 elsewhere do not mean the same thing.
Which check fails most often on the AEO Checker (Answer Engine Optimization)?
“FAQPage / QAPage schema”, which did not pass in 96% of scans. The costliest failures, though, are the ones 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 September 2026, https://seomods.com/seo-score-benchmarks/aeo-checker. If you need to cite by date, use the August 2026 edition instead: this page changes at every refresh and that one never does.