The propagation of surface waves, particularly Rayleigh waves, has become the subject of a large number of studies. As far as stratified media are concerned, many of the studies deal with an infinite substrate medium below the stratified or nonstratified medium, but, as far as infinite periodically stratified media are concerned, there is no complete work on leaky waves that behave as Rayleigh waves. By analogy with the behavior of the Rayleigh wave in isotropic media, the properties of what this group termed in previous papers ‘‘multilayered Rayleigh wave’’ in infinite anisotropic periodically multilayered media, were studied. These waves are a linear combination of three inhomogeneous Floquet waves and are dispersive. This theory was developed for plane waves. This paper aims to validate this theory by using an experimental acousto-optic technique linked to bounded beams. The experiments were carried out on a composite of carbon/epoxy layers. The coincidence of experimental and calculated dispersion curves of the multilayered Rayleigh modes was found to be quite good. [Work partially supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research and the Flemisch Institute for the Encouragement of the Scientific and Technological Research in Industry. Aerospatiale (France) has provided the characterized sample of carbon/epoxy composite.]