Methodology
The AEO Maturity Score
The AEO Maturity Score is the six-pillar audit Momentum Inspire, a commercial growth consultancy, uses to measure how visible a business is to AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. This page publishes the methodology in full, covering every pillar, every weight, the scoring formula and the bands, so any score we quote can be independently checked.
What are the six pillars?
Each pillar covers one reason an AI engine does or does not cite a business. A site is scored 0–100 on each pillar against the checks below, and the pillar weights, which sum to 100, set how much each one contributes to the final score.
| Pillar | Weight | What we check |
|---|---|---|
| Access & crawlability | 20% | Can AI crawlers reach the site at all? robots.txt rules for the major AI user agents, an llms.txt file, an XML sitemap, sensible canonicals, and content that renders without JavaScript. |
| Structured data | 20% | Does the site describe itself in a form machines can trust? Organisation and service schema, Person schema for named people, FAQPage where FAQs exist, Article and author markup on editorial pages, all validating without errors. |
| Content extractability | 20% | Can an engine lift an answer straight off the page? Definition-first openings, one H1 per page, question-led headings answered directly underneath, real lists and tables rather than styled paragraphs. |
| Entity clarity | 15% | Is it unambiguous who the business is? Full legal identity on the site, consistent name and address everywhere, disambiguation from similarly named businesses, and profiles that agree with the website. |
| Authority & trust | 15% | Why should an engine cite this site over another? Named authors with real profiles, verifiable claims with sources, third-party mentions and citations, and no anonymous or unverifiable marketing filler. |
| Measurement & freshness | 10% | Is anyone checking it still works? Regular checks of how the major engines answer questions about the business, content kept current, and broken or orphaned pages fixed. |
How is the score calculated?
In plain English: score each pillar out of 100, multiply it by that pillar’s weight, and add the six results together. The weights sum to 100, so the final score is also out of 100.
Final score = (Access × 0.20) + (Structured data × 0.20) + (Extractability × 0.20) + (Entity clarity × 0.15) + (Authority × 0.15) + (Measurement × 0.10)
Worked example: a site scoring 50 on every pillar scores 50 overall. A site with perfect technical access (100) but nothing else (0 on the other five pillars) scores just 20, which is the point. AI visibility fails on the weakest link, not the strongest.
What do the bands mean?
| Score | Band | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 0–24 | Invisible | AI engines either cannot read the site or find nothing worth citing. The business is effectively absent from AI answers. |
| 25–49 | Emerging | The basics are partly in place but engines still struggle to extract or trust the content. Mentions are rare and often inaccurate. |
| 50–74 | Established | Engines can read, extract and attribute the site's content. The business appears in relevant answers with correct details. |
| 75–100 | Authoritative | The business is a source engines prefer: cited by name, quoted accurately, and recommended in its category. |
Frequently asked questions
- Can I see the AEO Maturity Score applied to a real site?
- Yes, this one. Momentum Inspire's own July 2026 audit of its previous site scored 15 out of 100 (Invisible), and this website was rebuilt against every pillar on this page. We publish the methodology so any score we quote can be checked.
- Why publish the methodology instead of keeping it proprietary?
- Because a score you cannot inspect is a marketing claim, not a measurement. Publishing the pillars, weights and bands means a client, or a competitor, can verify how a number was reached, which is the same standard of verifiability we ask of every claim on this site.
- How do I get my business scored?
- Book a call. An initial audit against all six pillars is part of how every AEO engagement starts, and the output is the completed scorecard with the evidence behind each pillar score.
Want your score?
Every engagement starts with the audit on this page.