Checklist
The AEO checklist we run on every site before we touch anything.
These are the checks behind our readiness score. Run them against your live site and see which answer engines are most affected, what failed, and which fix should come first.
Run the checklist automatically
No account needed. We fetch your homepage, robots.txt and sitemap and score how ready your site is for AI search. This measures readiness, not rankings. How we measure
Crawler access
Nothing else matters if the agents cannot fetch the page.
- robots.txt exists and returns 200
- No blanket Disallow: / affecting GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and Bingbot
- Each AI agent you want has an explicit Allow rule
- No firewall or bot rule silently returning 403 to non-browser agents
Indexability and technical health
The basics that also decide classic search.
- No noindex on pages you want quoted
- One self-referencing canonical per page
- sitemap.xml reachable and linked from robots.txt
- Content present in the server HTML, not only after JavaScript runs
Structured data and entity clarity
How the machine learns what you are.
- Valid JSON-LD, no parse errors
- Organization or LocalBusiness node with name, url and logo
- sameAs links to your real profiles
- FAQPage schema on pages with a genuine question set
- Consistent name, address and description everywhere you appear
Answer-ready content
What turns an indexed page into a quoted one.
- One H1 that states what the page answers
- Subheadings phrased the way buyers ask the question
- A two-sentence direct answer under each of those subheadings
- Specific figures, dates and named examples rather than adjectives
- A named author with credentials, and a visible last-updated date
- Reachable contact details and a real about page
- Internal links to the related answers on your own site
- Third-party references corroborating your claims
Questions we get
How long does this take to work through?
A focused half day for a small site. The audit does the diagnostic part in about thirty seconds so you spend the time fixing rather than checking.
Next steps
Start with the free readiness audit above. When you want a human-reviewed diagnosis or help completing the fixes, there is a step for that too.