Free tool
Heading checker
Answer engines rarely quote whole pages. They lift sections, and headings are how they find them. Enter a URL and this checker returns the complete H1 to H6 outline, counts how many headings are phrased as questions, and warns about missing or duplicate H1s. You see in one glance whether your page is structured as liftable answers or as one long wall.
Answer engines lift sections, so structure is strategy
When an assistant answers a question, it grounds on retrieved passages rather than entire documents. A section that opens with a heading matching the question, followed by a direct answer in the first sentence, is precisely the shape retrieval favors. The demand side is large: Ahrefs data shows Google surfaces AI Overviews on more than 70 percent of informational and how-to results pages, and those Overviews are assembled from exactly this kind of liftable section.
This is why question-form headings get their own count in the report. A heading like How much does onboarding cost mirrors the query a buyer types into ChatGPT, and the paragraph beneath it can be quoted with minimal rewriting. Pages built as ten answerable sections routinely outperform longer pages built as continuous essay.
How to read your outline
The outline shows every heading at its level, indented the way a machine parses it. Look for three problems. A missing H1 leaves the page without a declared topic. Multiple H1s split that declaration, and while engines cope, they cope by guessing which one to trust. Skipped levels, such as an H2 jumping straight to H4, suggest headings chosen for font size rather than structure, which weakens the outline as a map of the content.
Then read the outline aloud as a table of contents. If a stranger could predict what each section says from its heading alone, machines can too. Headings like Overview and More thoughts fail that test; headings that name the entity, the number or the question pass it.
What to fix first
Set exactly one H1 that states the page topic in plain words. Then rewrite your vaguest H2s into the questions buyers actually ask, and make the first sentence under each one answer it directly, with the caveats afterward. Fix skipped levels last; they matter less than the wording. Structure gets you quoted accurately, and if you want to know whether engines then name your brand on those questions, Reachroller tracks that per question from $29 per month, with a free 3-day trial.
Frequently asked questions
Are multiple H1s actually a problem?+
Engines tolerate them, so nothing breaks outright. The cost is precision: the H1 declares what the page is about, and two declarations force the machine to pick one or blend them. Since the fix takes minutes, demote the secondary H1 to an H2 and keep one clear topic statement per page. HTML5 sectioning arguments rarely survive contact with real parsers.
Should every heading be a question?+
No, and a page of nothing but questions reads like a quiz. Aim question form at the sections buyers would genuinely ask about, pricing, comparisons, how-to steps and timelines, and keep declarative headings for the rest. The count in this report is a signal to weigh, and for most commercial pages a handful of true question headings covers the demand.
Do heading levels really matter to AI engines?+
The wording matters more than the number. Retrieval systems use headings to segment pages into passages and to label what each passage covers, so a descriptive H4 beats a vague H2. Levels still earn attention because a coherent hierarchy keeps sections cleanly bounded, and messy nesting can glue unrelated paragraphs into one passage that answers nothing well.
My outline is clean. Why do AI answers still skip my brand?+
Structure makes good content liftable, and it cannot compensate for content that answers the question worse than a competitor's page. Check that crawlers can fetch the page at all, then read what the engine currently cites for your target question and compare substance: specificity, evidence and recency. The outline is the container; the answer inside it wins or loses the citation.
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