One heading for a long page means one undifferentiated block of text; extractors need section boundaries.
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How this rule is weighted
- Importance
- 3 / 10
- How much this matters relative to other rules.
- Confidence
- RESEARCH
- Backed by large-sample study or industry research, not a specification.
- Severity
- info
- How the finding is presented when it fails.
- Scoring
- Counts
- A failure costs points in its category.
Impact is importance multiplied by the confidence tier’s weight — SPECIFICATION 1.0, RESEARCH 0.7, EMERGING 0.3, EXPERIMENTAL 0.1. Two rules backed by the same class of evidence therefore always carry the same weight, which is what makes the score reproducible rather than hand-tuned.
Questions about this rule
- Does AEO_HEADING_COUNT affect my score?
- Yes. It is an importance 3 rule at RESEARCH confidence, so a failure costs 3 × 0.7 points of impact in the Answer Engine category before that category is normalised to 100.
- What does RESEARCH confidence mean?
- Backed by large-sample study or industry research, not a specification. Confidence is a declared tier rather than a per-rule number, so every rule backed by the same class of evidence carries the same weight - which is what makes the score reproducible instead of hand-tuned.
- How do I check AEO_HEADING_COUNT on my own site?
- Paste your URL into the box above and it runs only this rule, usually in a couple of seconds. It is also included in the Answer Engine checker and in a full scan.
Tags
- aeo
- content-structure
Related Answer Engine rules
- Overall question-answer coverageComposite signal: does the page give answer engines BOTH machine-readable Q&A (FAQPage schema) AND human-readable Q&A structure (question-formatted headings)? A page with neither is meaningfully worse than one with just one missing.AEO_QUESTION_ANSWER_COVERAGE
- FAQPage schema presentFAQPage JSON-LD gives answer engines a structured, unambiguous question/answer pair to cite directly.AEO_FAQ_SCHEMA
- Article schema presentArticle markup supplies headline, author and dates - the provenance an answer engine needs before citing a page.AEO_ARTICLE_SCHEMA
- Content declares an authorAuthorship is a direct input to how much weight an answer engine gives a claim, and is explicit in Google's quality guidance.AEO_AUTHOR_DECLARED
- Heading levels descend without skippingHeadings should step down one level at a time (h2 -> h3, not h2 -> h4). Skipped levels break the document outline that answer engines and screen readers use to understand which content belongs to which section.AEO_HEADING_HIERARCHY
- Page has a <main> landmarkA <main> element tells an extractor which part of the DOM is the content rather than navigation, ads and footer.AEO_SEMANTIC_MAIN