We Built a Free Tool, Launched It on Peerlist, and Placed 3rd Product of the Week

What Is an AEO Checker – and Why Did We Build One?

When SaaS founders come to us at Inity Agency, they usually have the same concern: “Why isn’t our product getting found?”

For years, the answer was SEO; keywords, backlinks, rankings. But in 2025, that answer stopped being complete. A growing share of buyers now search in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews before they ever reach a website. If your site isn’t structured for AI, it won’t show up in those answers, no matter how good your design or copy is.

That gap is what Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) addresses. And it’s exactly the problem we built our Technical AEO Checker to diagnose.

What is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)? AEO is the practice of optimising your website so AI-powered search engines, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, can discover, understand, and cite your content. Unlike traditional SEO, which aims for rankings on Google’s blue links, AEO targets AI-generated answers, where a single source gets selected as the trusted response to a user’s question.

The Problem We Kept Seeing

After years of designing products for SaaS founders, we kept encountering the same pattern: technically sound, beautifully designed websites that AI search engines completely ignored.

The reasons were predictable: missing structured data, no schema markup, blocked AI crawlers, and weak content hierarchy. None of these is visible to the human eye – but they’re deal-breakers for AI citation.

We were manually auditing for these issues on every client engagement. It was time to automate it.

So we built Technical AEO Checker , a free AI visibility checker that scores any public URL and tells you exactly what to fix.

What the Technical AEO Checker Analyses

The tool audits four core dimensions of AI visibility:

• 1. Structured Data & Schema Markup: Are you using schema.org markup? Is it correctly implemented? Schema is the primary technical signal AI engines use to understand what a page is about, who created it, and what it offers.
• 2. Content Structure for AI Extraction AI systems favour content that’s organised with a clear semantic hierarchy – proper H1/H2/H3 structure, FAQ-style sections, and direct answers to specific questions. This is what makes content “citable.”
• 3. AI Crawler Access Can GPTBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot actually crawl your site? A misconfigured robots.txt or a missing sitemap will block AI engines entirely, even if your content is excellent.
• 4. Citability Score: Is your content formatted so AI can extract and reference it? Short, direct answers, clear source attribution, and factual precision all increase the probability that AI chooses your page as a source.

You get an overall AI Visibility Score plus a prioritised action list. No login required for the basic scan.

The Peerlist Launch: What Happened

We launched Technical AEO Checker on a Monday night in February 2026 – the start of Peerlist’s weekly Spotlight cycle.

• Within 12 hours: 51 upvotes and a Staff Pick of the Day badge.
• By the end of the week: 3rd place, Peerlist Product of the Week.

We didn’t run a paid promotion. We didn’t have a pre-built audience specifically for this tool. What we had was a genuine problem, a clean solution, and a community of builders who immediately understood why it mattered.

The Peerlist community is particularly strong for this kind of tool; it’s filled with founders, developers, and product managers who are actively thinking about distribution and visibility. The feedback was specific, constructive, and fast.

What We Learned from the Launch

• The AEO problem is more widely felt than we expected. Most founders hadn’t heard the term “AEO” before seeing the tool , but the moment we explained “your site might be invisible to ChatGPT,” they instantly connected with it. The problem is real even when the vocabulary isn’t there yet.
• Free tools are the highest-leverage content we’ve ever produced. This single launch generated more inbound interest than months of written content. People try it, share it, and naturally ask who built it.
• Peerlist rewards builders who ship real solutions. There’s no gaming the system here. The community can tell the difference between a genuine tool and a landing page with a waitlist. Ship something real.

The Broader Shift: Why AEO Matters Now

AEO isn’t a future trend – it’s happening now. Search behaviour is changing faster than most marketing strategies can keep up with:

• ChatGPT now processes over 2.5 billion prompts daily (Exploding Topics, 2025)
• AI Overviews appear on 21% of all Google searches (Ahrefs, 2025)
• Generative AI referral traffic to SMB sites was up 123% in the first half of 2025 (Goodie AI, 2025)

The companies that establish AI visibility now will be harder to displace in 6 months. It’s the same dynamic that played out with early SEO adopters in the 2010s – but compressed.

What’s Next for Technical AEO Checker

We’re actively building out additional features based on the feedback from the Peerlist launch:

• Competitor benchmarking – See how your AI visibility score compares to direct competitors in your space.
• Ongoing monitoring – Automated re-scans with alerts when your score changes, so you know when to act.
• Industry benchmarks – Context for your score against average SaaS, HealthTech, PropTech, and other verticals.

On the services side, we now offer AEO implementation as part of Inity Agency’s Fractional Product Team model – where we identify the issues and fix them as part of an ongoing design and optimisation retainer.

Try It Free

If you’ve never checked your site for AI visibility, run a free scan at aeo.inity.agency. It takes 30 seconds, and you’ll see exactly where you stand.

If you want help fixing what it finds – that’s what we do → inity.agency

Inity Agency is a fractional product team for SaaS founders, ranked #1 in Croatia and Serbia by Clutch. We design MVPs, run discovery sprints, and help early-stage startups go from idea to fundable product. Our clients have collectively raised €80M+.