Aeo Audit Stinger

You are equipping aeo-audit-wasp-drone, part of the Website Auditor by Legion Code Inc. plugin. Full scope and acceptance criteria: prd-009-aeo-audit.

Archive honesty note. references/research/distilled-aeo-audit.md has exactly two sources, both vendor/practitioner blogs (Ranki.io, The AEO Report), neither an official standard, spec, or engine-vendor primary document. Every technical presence/absence finding this Stinger produces (llms.txt exists, GPTBot is disallowed) is a directly observed fact. Every weighting, ranking, or citation-rate figure is one vendor's own self-reported heuristic - present it as attributed, never as an industry-agreed standard.

When to use this skill

• Wave 5 of every website-auditor run, after site-crawler-wasp-drone has written site-data/ and keyword-intelligence-wasp-drone has written content-targets/questions.md
• Checking whether a site is citation-friendly for AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Cohere)
• Validating llms.txt presence, shape, and length against the practitioner heuristics this archive documents
• Auditing per-engine AI-crawler robots.txt access, including the GPTBot-blocked-but-CCBot-allowed trap
• Distinguishing a technical AEO failure (llms.txt missing, a crawler blocked) from a merely subjective content-shape gap (no definitional first paragraph, no answer-style headings)

When NOT to use this skill

• Traditional-search technical SEO (crawlability, sitemap, robots.txt beyond AI-crawler-specific access, canonicalization) - that is technical-seo-stinger's scope, sharing this Stinger's site-data/ and content-targets/questions.md inputs but scoring distinct checkpoints (PRD-008)
• General JSON-LD/structured-data validity for traditional search rich results (Product, Offer, Review schema) - that is technical-seo-stinger's own Section 8 coverage; this Stinger's schema checklist is narrower, scoped specifically to citation-relevant types
• Asserting a citation-rate prediction for the audited site - no source in this archive is a controlled, reproducible study; the one citation-rate-adjacent statistic here (a 34% Perplexity figure) is a single vendor's single self-reported internal test
• Improving a repository you own - that is seo-aeo-stinger's scope (a different plugin, web-development-tools; see Related section)

Procedure

Full procedure lives in guides/, run in this order:

1. guides/01-audit-procedure.md - the procedural spine: scope, Part A (technical) sweep, Part B (subjective) read, triage, scoring, report. Read this first, every run.
2. guides/02-llms-txt-validation.md
3. guides/03-ai-crawler-robots-access.md
4. guides/04-structured-data-for-citation.md
5. guides/05-subjective-topical-alignment.md - [subjective], structurally separate from guides 02-04, per PRD-009 AC-2
6. guides/06-scoring-and-report-format.md - the 0-6 rubric and the 04-aeo/ output contract

Progressive disclosure map

Load on demand; do not read everything up front.

Path	Load when
references/research/distilled-aeo-audit.md	Verifying any AEO claim fast, and checking which of the two sources it comes from
Source research archive (not shipped with the plugin)	Source-repository only; the shipped distillation summarizes it, do not require it
guides/01-audit-procedure.md	Running a full pass end to end
guides/02, guides/03	llms.txt and AI-crawler-access depth (the two scripted checks)
guides/04	Schema-for-citation depth (no script, reads site-data/ directly)
guides/05	The subjective topical-alignment read
guides/06	Scoring and where output artifacts go
references/templates/llms-txt-validation-checklist.md	Working the llms.txt checkpoint
references/templates/ai-crawler-access-checklist.md	Working the AI-crawler-access checkpoint
references/templates/schema-signals-checklist.md	Working the citation-schema checkpoint
references/templates/subjective-alignment-worksheet.md	Working the subjective read
references/templates/audit-register-row-template.md	Writing a finding into the plugin-wide findings register
references/templates/aeo-section-report.md	Writing the final 04-aeo/aeo-audit.md deliverable
references/scripts/README.md	Running the deterministic aeo-technical.py script (shared at plugin root, shared/scripts/)

References map

• Research: references/research/distilled-aeo-audit.md (dense, cited synthesis, with an explicit thinness disclosure) and references/research/raw/ (source-repository research, not shipped with the plugin) (2 sources: Ranki.io's 2026 AEO checklist, The AEO Report's answer-engine-optimization checklist).
• Templates: llms.txt checklist, AI-crawler-access checklist, schema-signals checklist, subjective-alignment worksheet, audit-register row, section-report skeleton - all in references/templates/.
• Scripts: shared/scripts/aeo-technical.py (stdlib-only Python, llms.txt + AI-crawler-access validation), pointed to from references/scripts/README.md. Schema-for-citation has no script; it reads site-data/*.html directly (guide 04).
• Guides: guides/01 through guides/06, run in the order listed above.

Related drones and stingers

• aeo-audit-wasp-drone - this Stinger's paired Drone.
• technical-seo-stinger - shares site-data/ and content-targets/questions.md; scores distinct technical-SEO checkpoints. See that Stinger's guide 08 for the boundary between its long-tail semantic read and this Stinger's own subjective topical-alignment read (guide 05).
• keyword-intelligence-stinger - produces content-targets/questions.md, the source this Stinger's Q-### worksheet rows reference by ID; reconcile the exact ID convention against that Stinger's own final schema once it is authored.
• audit-scoring-stinger - rolls this Stinger's AEO-### register rows and scores into the plugin-wide XLSX scorecard.
• seo-aeo-stinger - a different plugin (web-development-tools, not this plugin), the internal-repo SvelteKit/Payload SEO-and-AEO specialist. Consult it by skill name (there is no valid relative path from this plugin into another installed plugin's skill folder) for AI-citation/llms.txt baseline reading where it overlaps. Do not duplicate its research archive; that Stinger optimizes a repo you own, this one audits a site you do not.

Critical Directive

• You must read all files and context contained within your skill.
• In the event your core knowledge does not provide sufficient guidance you must make every attempt to search the internet, related knowledge base documentation files, and other available resources to supplement your knowledge prior to proceeding with your task.
• Additional related skills can be found here:
  • aeo-audit-wasp-drone - this Stinger's paired Drone.
  • technical-seo-stinger - the technical-SEO sibling audit sharing this Stinger's inputs; consult for the boundary on long-tail semantic vs. AEO topical-alignment findings.
  • seo-aeo-stinger (web-development-tools plugin, installed separately) - internal-repo SEO/AEO specialist; consult for AI-citation/llms.txt baseline research where it overlaps.

Ship Gate

This Stinger's per-run output writes only into an external customer's audit workspace (04-aeo/ inside <domain>-audit/, build plan section 3), never into this plugin's own repository. The Ship Gate (security-stinger, quality-stinger, github-repo-health-stinger, per the build plan's Q22 answer) governs commits to this repository - it applies when this Stinger's or its paired Drone's own files change and those changes are being committed here, not to the audit findings this Drone produces about a customer's site. A per-run audit pass does not trigger the Ship Gate; a change to this SKILL.md, its guides, or its Drone file, committed to this repo, does.