The Grader I Started Using Instead
Free AEO evaluation tools are optimized sales funnels
Last week the tool couldn’t read a brand with twenty years of signal behind it. This week I pointed the same tool at one with almost none: this newsletter, three months old. The numbers came back quiet, and they agreed. 23 to 26 across all six topic queries, grounded recognition at 16 every time, zero of five on inclusion in every run.
No spread. The engines agreed.
Where Michael Kloth Photography pulled fifty points of disagreement out of five systems, the newsletter pulled near-consensus. Perplexity, OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok landed within a few points of each other, low. Claude went lowest, 5 to 8, noting that a search for the exact title “returned zero direct results.” One engine read the Substack profile closely enough to report the subscriber count: seven, the day I ran it. The number was correct, and two months in, it wasn’t the part that stung.
