AEO Gate

What the gate checks

This is the same deterministic gate our own publishing pipeline runs before an article is allowed out, not a scorecard invented for a tool page. It is grouped by the four pillars.

Technical foundations covers the structure a machine reads first: exactly one H1, the H1 carrying the primary keyword, no skipped heading levels, a clean tag vocabulary, length in band, JSON-LD emitted, and at least one extractable data table.

Topical content is the non-commodity half: a self-contained direct-answer opener, section headings phrased as the questions people ask, no banned commodity opening line, no jargon, no em dashes or exclamation marks, no AI-tell phrases, no invisible watermark characters, and an FAQ section at the end.

Trust signals asks whether every blockquote cites a source, whether primary sources are listed, whether they are primary rather than aggregators, and whether statistics link to where they came from. Authority network asks whether a named human wrote it, whether that person is linked to external profiles with sameAs, and whether the publishing organisation is identified.

How it works

The tool fetches the page source, isolates the article body from the page furniture, and derives the inputs the gate needs: the primary keyword from the URL slug, outbound citations from the body links, the author and publisher from JSON-LD. Open “What the gate was given” under the results to see exactly what it worked from, and set your own keyword or target length if the defaults are wrong.

Two honest limits. It reads the raw HTML, so anything injected by client-side JavaScript is invisible to it, exactly as it is to a crawler that does not render. And two checks are stricter than any general-purpose rule: the clean-tag list is the vocabulary our own generator is allowed to emit, so tags like code and pre are flagged on pages that legitimately use them, and the direct-answer check looks for a paragraph carrying id="direct-answer", which almost no site sets. Read those two as recommendations elsewhere and as requirements on your own pages.

Nothing is stored. The check runs on our server, returns the report to your browser, and that is the end of it.