Side by side
EdenLens and MaxAEO's free AEO checker
Both are free, need no signup and read a site the way an AI crawler would. They differ on three things: MaxAEO scores out of 100 and EdenLens does not; MaxAEO counts llms.txt and EdenLens does not; and MaxAEO's paid product monitors what AI answers say, while EdenLens's paid product is a review by a person.
What each one does
| EdenLens free audit | MaxAEO free AEO checker | |
|---|---|---|
| What it reads | One page as a crawler receives it, robots.txt, /sitemap.xml, and every profile the page declares | The homepage without JavaScript, robots.txt, llms.txt, the sitemap and its lastmod dates |
| AI crawlers | Six crawlers that fetch pages for ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity answers; five training tokens reported as a choice | 15 AI crawlers, each allowed or blocked with the deciding robots.txt line; training-only blocks noted and not scored |
| Business identity | Organization or LocalBusiness data field by field, and declared profiles opened and compared on name, telephone and postcode | Organization structured data, with copy-paste JSON-LD when it is missing |
| llms.txt | Not counted. No provider documents reading it, and Google says its AI features need no such file (our reasoning) | Checked as part of the machine-readable index group |
| What you get back | Up to three verified problems in the order they block each other, each with evidence and a repair page | A readiness score out of 100 (crawler access 30, index 30, readable without JavaScript 25, identity 15) with evidence and a fix per item |
| Free limit | No daily cap; a per-minute limit stops bulk crawling | 10 free checks a day |
| What it does not do | Ask the assistants what they say about you | The checker itself does not; MaxAEO's paid monitoring does |
| The paid step after | One-off reviews by a person: Pro Review £695, Launch £295; a quarterly re-check, Steward, £295 a quarter | Daily AI answer monitoring by subscription: Starter $19, Growth $149, Pro $399 a month, after a 7-day free trial |
MaxAEO's figures are from its free AEO checker page and pricing page, read 23 October 2026.
Choose MaxAEO when
- You want to watch what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and others actually say about your brand, day by day. That is MaxAEO's product, and EdenLens does not do it.
- You want a single readiness number to report upwards.
- You want a wider list of named AI crawlers in one view.
Choose EdenLens when
- You want the identity check to go beyond the page: the profiles it declares, opened and compared.
- You want problems in the order they block each other, each with the exact repair and the test that proves it, instead of points to recover.
- You would rather not be scored on llms.txt, which no provider documents reading.
- You want the wider picture verified once by a person, rather than a monthly subscription.
Or use both
A readiness check and answer monitoring do different jobs. EdenLens tells you whether the page can be read and the business identified; monitoring tells you what the answers say afterwards. Neither can promise a mention.
How this page was written
EdenLens wrote this page, so read it as one side's account. Every statement about MaxAEO is taken from MaxAEO's own published pages as they stood on 23 October 2026, linked above, and none of it is a test we ran on their tool. If anything here is wrong or has changed, write to info@edenlens.com and we will correct it and date the correction. Prices for EdenLens come from our pricing page.