Methodology
Study question
How answer-engine-ready are the marketing sites of AEO and SEO tools themselves?
Instrument
Every site in the benchmark was measured with a deterministic AEO (answer engine optimization) audit:
- 8-dimension AEO score (0–100) — direct answer, structure, schema, entity, E-E-A-T, recency, readability, extractability. Deterministic heuristics; no model judgement in any measurement.
- Technical checks — canonical, metadata, and crawlability signals read from the live page.
- Structured-data detection — JSON-LD
@typevalues present on the page. - Capability probes — visible Q&A/FAQ block, comparison-intent content, review signals, social-proof signals.
One representative page per site was measured. The measurement path contains no LLM: every number in the study is computed in code from the fetched pages.
Sample
- Sites attempted: 43
- Successfully measured: 42
- Unreachable (recorded as negatives): 1
- Measured on: 2026-07-26
The full site list, per-site measurements, and negatives are in the dataset.
Unreachable sites
| Site | Status | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| se-ranking.com | unreachable | The operation was aborted due to timeout |
Depth floor and refusal conditions
This study format refuses to publish below a minimum sample: at least 20 successfully measured sites (ceiling 60). A benchmark below that floor is not published as research — there is no "directional" primary data.
Limitations
- Scores describe answer-engine readiness of one representative page per site at the measurement date, not overall site quality or business performance.
- Unreachable sites may have blocked automated access; their absence from the measured statistics is disclosed above rather than silently dropped.
- The benchmark set is the curated list published in the dataset — statistics describe this sample, not the entire category.
Read the full study: AEO and SEO tool marketing sites.