NiceCite audit methodology · reviewed by the NiceCite team
Short, honest answers about AEO, AI citations, scoring, and how NiceCite works.
AEO is the practice of optimizing a website so that AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews can confidently quote it as a source. AEO replaces keyword-stuffed SEO with clear entity definition, structured data, direct answers, and trust signals that large language models can verify.
NiceCite fetches robots.txt and sitemap.xml, follows internal links from your homepage, and extracts up to your plan's page limit. Each page is parsed for title, meta description, canonical tag, headings, body text, JSON-LD blocks (including those nested inside @graph), Open Graph data, contact info, and FAQ markers. We respect robots.txt and do not log in or bypass authentication.
Measured facts include pages crawled, word counts, headings, meta presence, canonical tags, JSON-LD schema types (flattened across @graph), robots and sitemap status, social profile links, contact info, FAQ presence, and per-category scores. These come directly from your HTML.
Scores can shift if your site changes, if you publish or remove pages, if schema is added or broken, or if a different sample of URLs is crawled. The scoring formula itself is deterministic — given the same crawl snapshot, you get the same score.
The free plan includes 3 audits per month, a small page limit per audit, the full six-category score, prioritized recommendations, and a shareable report link. No credit card required.
Premium increases pages per audit, monthly audit count, unlocks competitor comparison, historical tracking, monitoring alerts, AI readiness deep-dive, white-label PDFs, and priority generation for fixes (copy, schema, FAQ drafts).
No. Nobody can. Answer engines decide who they cite based on signals that change over time and across queries. What we guarantee is a deterministic, evidence-based score plus a fix list built from what your site actually contains today.
We store the URL you audited, the parsed page snapshots, the JSON-LD blocks we found, the category scores, the recommendations, and the report itself. We do not sell audit data and do not share it with third parties.
Every audit gets a shareable share/<id> URL you can send to clients or teammates. PDFs are generated client-side and include a dark branded cover plus light content pages. Premium accounts can white-label the PDF with their own brand.
Credits power optional AI generation features like rewriting copy, drafting FAQs, and generating JSON-LD schema. Running an audit itself uses your monthly audit quota, not credits.
Yes. The Schema, Trust, and Answer Readiness categories map directly to the signals Google's generative results favor. Detected schema types like Organization, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList, and Product are all scored.
The report includes an AI Engine Readiness panel that estimates per-engine readiness using weighted blends of Answer Readiness, Entity Clarity, Schema, and Trust. Different engines weight signals differently, so the per-engine scores can differ from the overall score.
Yes — the Schema Suggestions section in every report gives you ready-to-paste JSON-LD blocks for Organization, FAQPage, and other types the audit identified as missing or weak.
If your SPA renders real HTML, meta tags, and JSON-LD server-side or via prerendering, NiceCite will see it. If your site is fully client-rendered with no server HTML, the crawl will see an empty shell and the score will reflect that — which is also what AI crawlers see.
Traditional SEO tools measure backlinks, keyword rankings, and SERP positions. NiceCite measures what answer engines actually read: entity clarity, schema coverage, direct-answer structure, and citation-worthy trust signals. The two are complementary.
Still have a question? Contact us or run a free audit.