Getting Started

From zero to your first score in under 5 minutes

Last updated

AEOForged helps you make content that AI answer engines can find, understand, and cite. Whether you're building a site and writing in your IDE, or managing client sites and running audits, you use the same platform — just different starting points.

Choose your path

AEOForged is built for agencies and in-house teams first. Pick the path that matches how you work, then follow the steps below.

Managing client sites

You manage one or more websites and want to audit them, fix issues, and deliver results to stakeholders.

  1. 1Add a client at Clients and create a project
  2. 2Run diagnose to audit the entire site (free)
  3. 3Work through the action queue — claim, fix, mark done
  4. 4Connect an agent or fix manually via CMS/repo
  5. 5verify-page to confirm fixes landed
  6. 6Create a curated report and share with your client

Building a site

You write content in your IDE (Cursor, VS Code, Claude Code) and want AI-grounded research, scoring, and structured data without leaving your editor.

Self-serve Pro subscription for solo builders returns in a future release. API keys and MCP remain available on paid tiers — see pricing.

  1. 1Create an API key at Settings → API Keys
  2. 2Connect via MCP or call the REST API directly
  3. 3Run research on your topic (10 credits)
  4. 4Write your article in your IDE using the research
  5. 5score it (free) — iterate until 80+
  6. 6Generate schema JSON-LD (free), publish

First 5 minutes

Confirm your API key works, see what tools are available, and score something — all free.

1

Check your account

GET /api/v1/me · Free

Confirms your API key is valid and shows your tier, credit balance, and per-tool costs.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer aeo_sk_YOUR_KEY" \
  https://aeoforged.com/api/v1/me
2

Discover tools and workflows

GET /api/v1/onboard · Free

Returns the full tool catalog with costs, the 8-dimension scoring rubric, recommended workflows, and playbooks. Agents should read this before calling any paid tool.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer aeo_sk_YOUR_KEY" \
  https://aeoforged.com/api/v1/onboard
3

Score your first page

POST /api/v1/score · Free

Pass any markdown or a live URL and get an 8-dimension AEO score (0–100) with prioritised suggestions. Scoring is always free, so use it on every edit.

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer aeo_sk_YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://yoursite.com/any-page"}' \
  https://aeoforged.com/api/v1/score

Check the X-AEO-Score and X-AEO-Weakest response headers for a quick summary.

Credits and honesty

What's free

  • Scoring— unlimited, always 0 credits
  • Schema generation — JSON-LD, free
  • Extract— snippet formatting, free
  • Factcheck— deterministic grounding check, free
  • Site audit (diagnose) — free tier deep-analyzes every discovered page (up to 30), ~3 per day
  • Crawlability — AI bot access check, free

What costs credits

  • Research— 10 credits (deep: 15)
  • Outline— 3 credits
  • Write— 8 credits
  • Polish— 2 credits
  • Share of Voice — 10 credits

Full cost table: GET /api/v1/me tool_costs

What we measure and what we don't

AEOForged scores measure publish readiness — structure, direct answers, schema, entity coverage, E-E-A-T signals, recency, readability, and extractability. We do not guarantee that scored content will be cited by any AI answer engine. Measured citation outcomes are tracked separately in our proof harness when sample size allows, and are labelled as such.

Next steps