Issue No. 10 - August 11, 2026

The audit score came back. We passed. That should have felt like good news.

It mostly did, except for the part I couldn't stop thinking about.

A few weeks ago I started running free AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) audits. It's the practice of making your content easier for AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews to find and cite. Several free tools will score your site and flag the gaps. I ran a few, including ones through Google and Webflow, to see where JB Sales stood.

The score came back fine. Passing, with room to improve. There was a list of 'things to fix'. And that's where it got interesting.

These tools evaluate one domain at a time. That's the whole model. You put in a URL, they analyze it, they give you a report. The problem is JB Sales isn't one domain. We have the main site. We have the blog site. We have our Membership learning site. Each one doing a different job. The main site is the brand and the offer. The blog is where the content depth lives. The Membership learning site is our catalog of online content. An audit that looks at one doesn't know the other exists. It doesn't know how they're supposed to work together, which domain carries which content type, or what the overall visibility goal is across both.

When it tells me there's "room for improvement," it's advising a version of JB Sales it's only partially seen.

That doesn't make the findings useless. Some of them are genuinely useful. But I can't take the list and work through it as given. I have to hold each item up against the actual strategy first. Is this a real gap, or is it covered somewhere else? Is this the right domain for this fix? Is this finding based on what the tool could see, or on what's actually true about how we're structured?

I've been using AI to help work through the results. It's useful. But here's what I keep coming back to: AI can only analyze what the audit gave it. Feed it one domain's results and it gives you smart recommendations for that domain. It doesn't know about the domains it hasn't seen, the content strategy that runs across all of them, or the business priorities that should determine what actually gets fixed first. That context has to come from you. The AI can process the findings. It can't bring the strategy.

That's still a human job. And it matters more than the score.

Where this lands in the three buckets

Immediately actionable: Before you act on any AEO audit finding, note what the tool didn't have visibility into. Single domain only? No knowledge of your other properties or overall content strategy? That missing context is the filter you apply before you prioritize anything on the list.

Start thinking about: Whether you have a clear sense of what each of your domains is supposed to do. If you're running more than one, do you know which one handles which content type and audience? Without that clarity, a single-domain audit score is hard to interpret accurately, regardless of what tools you use to analyze it.

Next phase: A cross-domain view of your AEO performance. Not just auditing each property separately, but understanding how they're working together and whether your overall visibility goals are being met across the system. That's a picture no single audit tool can give you. You have to build it yourself.

Meghan Brenner is COO at JB Sales and founder of The Operator's Notebook. The Muddy Middle publishes every Tuesday.