Before you spend on getting cited by AI, audit where you stand. This 12-point checklist covers every signal AI answer engines use — run it on your own site, or get an instant scored version with our free AI visibility check.
Technical floor
1. Are AI crawlers allowed?
Check robots.txt isn't blocking GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot. If they're blocked, nothing else matters — you're invisible to those engines.
2. Is the site fast and crawlable?
Clean, semantic HTML, fast load, no render-blocking that hides content. AI reads the same DOM search engines do.
3. Do you have an llms.txt?
A simple file pointing AI tools to your key content. Not a ranking hack, but auditing it surfaces the crawler-blocks in check #1.
4. Is your Bing presence solid?
ChatGPT's search leans on Bing. Submit to Bing Webmaster Tools and confirm your key pages are indexed there, not just in Google.
Content & structure
5. Is your content answer-first?
Key pages should put the buyer's question in a heading and answer it in the first two sentences — self-contained and liftable.
6. Do you have real FAQ sections with schema?
FAQPage schema on genuine questions is one of the most-cited formats in AI answers.
7. Is there original, first-hand data?
At least one page with your own numbers, results or benchmarks — AI quotes specifics, not slogans.
8. Is it multimodal?
Genuine images and video get surfaced in AI answers; text-only pages compete with a hand tied behind them.
Entity & authority
9. Is your entity schema in place?
Organization/LocalBusiness JSON-LD so AI can confidently identify who you are.
10. Are your details consistent across the web?
Name, services and location identical across your site, Google Business Profile and directories. Contradictions create doubt, and doubt means you're left out.
11. Do independent sources mention you?
Reviews, "best in [city]" roundups, Reddit/Quora threads, YouTube mentions. Consensus is what AI trusts.
Measurement
12. Are you tracking share-of-answer?
Pick 20–30 buyer prompts and run them weekly across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, logging who gets cited. Without this you're optimising blind.
What to do with your results
Score yourself out of 12. Below 8 and there's clear room to get cited more. Our free tool runs the technical half of this instantly and emails you the fixes; our AI Visibility service implements the whole checklist for you.
FAQ
How often should I run an AI visibility audit?
Quarterly for the full checklist, plus weekly share-of-answer tracking — the AI-search landscape shifts fast.
What's the single biggest miss on most sites?
Accidentally blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt, followed by weak Bing coverage. Both silently cap everything else.
Can I do this audit myself?
The technical checks, yes — start with our free check. The content, entity and measurement work is where most businesses bring us in.