Checklist

The 40-point AI Visibility Audit Checklist

The checks we run on every site before we write a single word of content. Work through them in order — access problems make everything downstream irrelevant.

Access

  1. robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot
  2. robots.txt allows PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot
  3. robots.txt allows Googlebot and Bingbot
  4. Training-crawler policy (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, CCBot) decided and documented
  5. CDN / WAF bot rules do not block or challenge search crawlers
  6. Live robots.txt matches the intended file (no injected rules)
  7. XML sitemap referenced in robots.txt and returns 200
  8. Key pages return 200 without login, geo-block or interstitial

Rendering & technical

  1. Primary content present in server-rendered HTML
  2. One canonical URL per page; no conflicting canonicals
  3. No accidental noindex in meta robots or X-Robots-Tag
  4. HTTPS everywhere with HSTS
  5. Core Web Vitals in the “good” range (LCP ≤ 2.5s, INP < 200ms, CLS < 0.1)
  6. hreflang for each language or market version
  7. Clean, descriptive URLs and internal links
  8. llms.txt published with a concise map of key pages

Entity & structured data

  1. Organization markup with name, URL, logo, description, contact point
  2. sameAs links to official profiles
  3. WebSite and BreadcrumbList markup
  4. Article markup with author, publisher and dates on content
  5. Product / Offer or Service markup on commercial pages
  6. Consistent company facts across site, profiles and directories
  7. About page states what the company does, for whom, and where
  8. Named experts with credentials on expertise pages

Content & answerability

  1. Answer-first summaries on key pages
  2. Clear definitions of category terms
  3. Honest comparison and alternatives pages
  4. Pricing information or ranges in HTML
  5. Use-case and industry pages that state best fit
  6. Statistics with cited sources
  7. Original data or research assets
  8. Concise FAQ sections reflecting real buyer questions
  9. Dates and update notes on time-sensitive content
  10. Specs, integrations and security facts outside PDFs

Off-site authority

  1. Complete, current profiles on the review platforms cited in your category
  2. Inclusion on the lists and comparisons engines cite for your prompts
  3. Digital PR producing citable third-party coverage
  4. Helpful participation in communities engines surface
  5. Partner and integration directory listings
  6. Monitoring of inaccurate third-party information with a correction process

Want us to run all 40 — plus a prompt-level visibility benchmark against your competitors? Request the free AI Visibility Audit.

Next step

See where AI recommends your competitors instead of you.

Run the instant AI-readiness check in 30 seconds. Our strategists follow up with a prompt-level audit across ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity within 48 hours.