Case study: We audited 50 SaaS homepages - here's what failed

AEO is emerging fast enough that most sites have had no time to adapt. To understand the current baseline, we ran 50 SaaS homepages through a full CiteRank audit covering all nine AEO signal categories. The sites ranged from bootstrapped tools with under 1,000 customers to publicly traded companies with dedicated SEO teams.

The findings were stark, but also encouraging: most of the failures are fixable in an afternoon.

The findings at a glance

• Average AEO score: 34/100 (range: 12-71)
• 0 of 50 sites had FAQPage schema on their homepage
• 36 of 50 sites (72%) had at least one AI crawler blocked in robots.txt
• 34 of 50 sites lacked any author markup
• 44 of 50 sites had no Organization schema
• 29 of 50 sites had no sitemap.xml accessible at /sitemap.xml
• 6 of 50 sites scored above 60 - only these can be considered AEO-ready

The most common failure: robots.txt

The single most widespread failure was AI crawler access, and the cause was almost always the same pattern: a legacy robots.txt that either used a catch-all Disallow with a whitelist approach, or explicitly blocked CCBot (Common Crawl) and inadvertently also blocked newer AI crawlers that share similar characteristics in overly broad rules.

Many of these rules were added years ago on the advice of SEO consultants trying to prevent scraping. The advice was reasonable at the time. But now those same rules are blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot. Nine of the 36 affected sites had added explicit 'Disallow: /' rules for user agents that included wildcards matching AI crawler strings.

The structured data gap

Not one of the 50 homepages had FAQPage schema. This is the most impactful schema type for AEO, and it is entirely absent from SaaS homepages - possibly because traditional SEO advice has treated FAQ schema as a nice-to-have for content pages, not a homepage priority.

The disconnect is understandable: a SaaS homepage is not a FAQ page in the traditional sense. But AI engines do not see a product marketing page - they see a page that could answer questions like 'What does [product] do?' and 'How much does [product] cost?'. Adding 3-5 FAQ schema entries about your product's core value proposition is a 30-minute task with an outsized AEO impact.

What the top 6 sites had in common

The six sites that scored above 60 shared four characteristics that the others lacked:

1. All six had a default-allow robots.txt that explicitly permitted or did not block major AI crawlers
2. All six had Organization schema with at minimum a name, URL, and logo
3. All six had strong content structure - single H1, logical heading hierarchy, paragraphs under 100 words
4. Five of the six had a clear About page linked from the main navigation with specific founding information

Notably, none of the top six had FAQPage schema on their homepage either - so even the best-performing sites have low-hanging AEO fruit remaining. The top performers were distinguished by getting the fundamentals right (crawlability, org identity, structure) rather than having any advanced optimisation.

The 3 fixes with the highest ROI

Fix 1: Update robots.txt (30 minutes)

Switch to a default-allow pattern that restricts only paths you genuinely do not want indexed (/admin, /api, /private). Remove any wildcard blocks that could be catching AI crawlers. This alone would move 36 of our 50 audited sites from failing the crawler access check to passing it.

Fix 2: Add FAQPage schema to homepage (1-2 hours)

Write 4-6 questions that real users ask about your product - what it does, who it is for, how it is priced, how it compares to alternatives. Add each as a Question/Answer pair in FAQPage JSON-LD. This is the highest-impact single change for AEO citation rate.

Fix 3: Add Organization schema with complete fields (30 minutes)

Add Organisation schema to your homepage with name, URL, logo, contactPoint (email), and if possible foundingDate and numberOfEmployees. This data is already public on your About page or LinkedIn - this task is just encoding it in structured form for machines to read.