AEO Rank: How Benchmarks and Peer Comparison Work

A score of 65 without context is not information. It is anxiety. Good? Bad? You have no idea.

Now add context: the average in your category is 43. Suddenly that 65 is not mediocre - it is dominant. You are 22 points above your peers. AI engines choosing between you and a competitor in your niche will see a massive structural advantage on your side.

Flip it. Score of 75. Feels strong, right? Then you check the benchmarks and see three direct competitors at 82, 84, and 88. That 75 is not strong. That is third from the bottom in a competitive category.

Score is absolute. It measures your site against 22 criteria regardless of what anyone else does. Improve your schema markup and your score goes up whether or not your competitors touch theirs.

Rank is relative. Your rank can drop without you changing a thing - it just means someone else got better. And it can climb without you lifting a finger - if a competitor's site breaks or new low-scoring domains enter the benchmark.

We show both on every domain dashboard because they tell different stories. High score, low rank? You are in a bloodbath of a category - everyone is optimized. Low score, high rank? You are in an underserved niche. Easy pickings if you invest even a few hours in AEO.

Put on ChatGPT's glasses for a second. You are asked "What is the best project management tool?" You have 487 websites in your index. Which ones do you cite?

The ones that made it easiest for you to understand what they do, who they serve, and why they are credible. That is what the AEO score measures. The global rank just lines everyone up by that score.

Here is how we do it:

Deduplicate by domain. monday.com gets audited by ChatGPT (score: 78) and Claude (score: 72). We keep the 78. Your rank reflects your best engine, not your worst day.

Sort descending. notion.com at 82 goes above monday.com at 78. Simple as that. Ties go to whoever got audited first - first-mover advantage, AEO edition.

Find your position. Your global rank is your 1-indexed spot in this sorted list.

On your domain dashboard, this appears as:

#42 of 487 overall

That means 41 domains scored higher than you. Out of 487 total. Top 10% globally (roughly #1-49 out of 487) means your site is among the most AI-optimized we have ever measured. Bottom 25% means the majority of sites we audit - even without dedicated AEO work - outperform yours.

That is not a comfortable fact. But it is a useful one.

Your global rank tells you where you sit among all websites. But you are not competing with all websites. You are competing with the websites in your industry that answer the same questions you do.

That is where sector ranking changes everything.

We benchmark across 15 sectors and 28 categories. Healthcare. SaaS. Developer Tools. Finance. E-commerce. Each domain gets assigned to exactly one sector and one category based on what it actually does - not what it wishes it did.

Your sector rank filters the global list to your peers only:

#5 of 34 in SaaS & Productivity

Among the 34 SaaS companies we have audited, you rank fifth. Far more useful than knowing you are #42 out of 487 random domains.

We also show you the two competitors directly above you:

Ahead of you: - competitor-a.com 71 - competitor-b.com 68

Those are not abstract numbers. Click through and you land on their full audit. See exactly which criteria they nailed that you did not. Maybe their llms.txt is 200 lines while yours is 30. Maybe they have FAQPage schema and you have zero.

The distance between you and the site above you is always specific. Which means it is always closeable.

When you visit a category page like /benchmarks/saas-productivity/project-management, you see a number: "Avg score: 67." That number is the bar for your niche. Here is exactly how we get there.

Best score per domain. Every domain keeps only its highest score across all engines. If ChatGPT gives notion.com 82 and Claude gives it 79, the average uses 82. We want to know how well each domain CAN score, not the mean of its worst and best days.

Simple arithmetic mean. Add up all best-per-domain scores, divide by the number of domains, round to nearest integer. No weighting. No tricks.

Here is what that looks like for Project Management with 12 domains:

Domain               Best Score
-------------------------------
notion.com                   82
monday.com                   78
clickup.com                  76
asana.com                    74
linear.app                   72
basecamp.com                 68
wrike.com                    65
trello.com                   64
teamwork.com                 61
shortcut.com                 58
smartsheet.com               55
mural.co                     52
-------------------------------
Sum: 805  /  12 domains  =  67

That 67 is your competitive bar. Every domain in the category is measured against it. And it moves - every new audit or score update shifts it in real time.

Here is where it gets interesting across sectors. We have tracked category averages across hundreds of audits. The pattern is stark: SaaS categories tend to average 55-70. Tech companies generally have better technical infrastructure - they know what JSON-LD is and their dev teams can ship it. Healthcare categories often average 35-50. The industry has historically underinvested in web content optimization.

That is not a judgment. That is an opportunity signal. Lower-average categories mean less competition and faster ranking gains. A 55 in Healthcare puts you in the top quartile. A 55 in SaaS puts you below average.

Category average: 67. Your score: 74. Delta: +7.

Above Average. Not close. You are meaningfully outperforming your peers on AI visibility. Competitors would need real structural changes to catch up.

Category average: 67. Your score: 64. Delta: -3.

Average. You are in the pack. Not leading, not trailing. A single afternoon adding FAQ schema could tip you over the line.

Category average: 67. Your score: 55. Delta: -12.

Below Average. Your peers have better AI visibility infrastructure. When someone asks ChatGPT about your industry, the engines are more likely to cite a competitor than you.

Why 5 points as the threshold? Because AEO scores have natural variance. A 2-point difference could come down to one robots.txt line or a missing alt attribute - that is not a meaningful structural gap. But 7 points? That represents genuine differences in implementation depth. Schema markup you have that they do not. A llms.txt file they built and you skipped.

The 5-point threshold acts like a sieve. It filters out noise and surfaces the real competitive gaps.

``` Category Average: 67 Your Score: 74 Delta: +7 -> Above Average

Category Average: 67 Your Score: 64 Delta: -3 -> Average (within +/-5)

Category Average: 67 Your Score: 55 Delta: -12 -> Below Average ```

And that number moves. Three new high-scoring competitors enter your category next month, and your "Above Average" badge quietly becomes "Average" - even though your score has not changed. The benchmark reflects competitive reality, not a static target. Check it: aeocontent.ai/benchmarks.

We built the benchmarks as a drill-down. Three levels. Each one zooms closer to your actual competitive position.

Level 1: /benchmarks - The Landscape. Every sector on a card. Total domains audited, average score, category breakdown. You scan this and immediately see: which industries are most optimized, which have the most domains in our benchmark, and where the biggest gaps exist. Healthcare averaging 41 while SaaS averages 58? That tells you something about where AI visibility investment is flowing.

Level 2: /benchmarks/[sector] - Your Industry. Drill into your sector and you see categories ranked by average score. Strongest niches first. If you are in SaaS and see "Scheduling & Booking" averaging 76 while "Knowledge Management" averages 62, you know scheduling tools are fighting harder for AI citations. That context matters when you are deciding how much effort to invest.

Level 3: /benchmarks/[sector]/[category] - Your Competitors. The deepest level. Every domain in your category, ranked by best score. Domain name. Engine scores. Best score. Whether they have a visibility report. Audit date. The category average displayed prominently at the top.

Three clicks. From "how does AI visibility look across all industries" to "where exactly does my company rank among direct competitors." Below the table, we link to the knowledge base articles that explain the criteria driving these scores - so you know not just where you rank, but exactly what to fix to move up.

Every published audit carries a sector and a category. The sector is stored as a slug like "saas-productivity." The category is stored as a full name like "Project Management." These get assigned during the audit generation process based on what your site actually does.

The full hierarchy lives in a taxonomy table:

Sector                              Categories
---------------------------------------------------------------------
AI & Marketing Technology           AI Writing, Marketing Automation
SaaS & Productivity                 Project Management, Scheduling, ...
Developer Tools & Infrastructure    Cloud & Hosting, CI/CD, ...
Healthcare & Patient Advocacy       Home Health Care, Assisted Living, ...
Finance & Payments                  Payment Processing, Corporate Banking
CRM & Sales                         CRM Platforms
...15 sectors, 28 categories total

One sector. One category. No double-counting. If your company straddles two industries - say, a healthcare SaaS company - we assign you to the sector where you most directly compete for AI citations. That is a judgment call, but it is the right one. Benchmarks only work when the peer group is coherent.

The taxonomy grows as our benchmark grows. Adding a new category is a database insert. The benchmarks pages pick it up automatically. No code changes needed.

Here is the thing most people miss about ranking: AI engines do not check your AEO rank before deciding whether to cite you. There is no leaderboard that ChatGPT consults. Your rank is not a signal - it is a mirror.

What ranking gives you is the competitive intelligence to stop guessing and start prioritizing.

You rank #3 in your category with a score of 74. The #1 site has 82. That is not an abstract 8-point gap. Click their audit. See the exact criteria where they outperform you. Maybe they have comprehensive FAQ schema that you skipped. Maybe their Entity Authority is 9/10 while yours is 5/10 because your Organization schema has a different name than your footer.

The gap is specific. Which means it is fixable.

Below Average in your category? That is a concrete signal that your competitors have invested more in AI visibility. The category average tells you the minimum bar. Clear it, and you are back in the pack. Push 5 points past it, and you are Above Average.

Already #1? That does not mean you are done. It means you are leading your current peer group. Look at how your category compares to other categories in your sector. Look at how your sector compares globally. There is always someone ahead if you zoom out far enough.

Your score tells you where you are. Your rank tells you who is ahead and by how much. The category average tells you what "normal" looks like in your niche. Use all three.

Start here: Run your free audit at aeocontent.ai, then check your ranking at /benchmarks. If you are more than 5 points below your category average, our knowledge base has a guide for every criterion that can close the gap.