Why we built AEO Radar

I run a small portfolio of independent web tools under Boringhaus. Six of them, plus a brand-hub. Last quarter I started looking at where new traffic was coming from, and a chunk of it was AI — Perplexity citations, ChatGPT browsing referrals, Bing Copilot, the AI Overview snippets in Google. Not the majority yet. But growing fast enough that ignoring it felt like ignoring mobile traffic in 2010.

So I went looking for an SEO tool that would tell me how my sites looked to ChatGPT. There wasn’t one.

Lighthouse checks if Google can crawl you. Ahrefs checks if Google ranks you. PageSpeed Insights checks if Google’s user agent is happy. None of them check whether your site has an llms.txt, whether your robots.txt has rules for GPTBot or ClaudeBot, whether your JSON-LD includes the schema types AI Overviews quote from. The handful of “AEO” tools I found were either thin wrappers around classic SEO checks or paywalled enterprise platforms with $500/month minimums.

I wanted a free thing that scans a URL and tells you, in 30 seconds, whether AI search engines can find, understand, and cite you. So I wrote one.

That’s what AEO Radar is. It runs the same checks on any URL you give it: 29 of them across four categories — SEO fundamentals, AEO-specific signals, security headers, and basic performance. You get a letter grade, a numeric score, and a per-check breakdown of what’s working and what’s not. No signup. No tracking pixels on the URL you scan. Five free scans per IP per month.

It’s not magic. It can’t tell you whether your prose is good, whether your product is interesting, or whether your customer’s actual problem is something a search engine can solve. It tells you whether the technical foundation is in place for AI engines to do their job — which is the part most sites are quietly failing.

We built it for ourselves first. The first thing I did was scan all six Boringhaus properties and find a dozen things to fix. The scanner runs against itself on every deploy, and the build fails if the score drops below 90 or any check goes red — so the site you’re reading this on has to pass its own audit, every time.

We’re shipping the free scan now. Paid plans (multi-site, scheduled scans, fix recommendations, alerts, API access) are coming. If that’s interesting, join the waitlist — early access pricing locks in for waitlist members.

If you just want to see what your site looks like to AI search, run a scan. It’s free and there’s nothing to install.

— Clinton
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