Twenty checks, ordered by impact: eight site-wide (do once), eight per-page (do on every page that matters), four measurement (do monthly). Each check names the free tool that verifies it in seconds. Work top to bottom — the early items gate everything below them.
Site-wide: access & context (do once)
1. AI crawlers can reach your site. Your robots.txt doesn't block the bots you want — check all 15 at once with the AI Crawler Access Checker. Watch for old blanket bot-blocking rules.
2. Your blocking choices are deliberate. Training vs search crawlers are separate decisions — know which you're blocking and why. The bot directory explains each agent; the robots.txt generator implements your policy.
3. Your firewall isn't silently blocking bots. CDN bot protection can block AI crawlers that robots.txt allows. Verify actual visits in your server logs with the AI Bot Log Analyzer.
4. llms.txt exists and validates. A curated Markdown index at /llms.txt — generate it, then validate the live file.
5. Content is server-rendered. Most AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript. curl a key page and confirm your content is in the raw HTML.
6. sitemap.xml is live and submitted. AI systems lean on search indexes; your sitemap feeds them. Build one if you lack it, and submit it in both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools — Bing's index powers ChatGPT search.
7. Site-level schema is in place and valid. Organization/WebSite JSON-LD in server-rendered HTML — confirm with the Schema Validator.
8. One full audit passes. Run the AI-Readiness Audit on your homepage and your most important page. Fix what it flags before moving on.
Per-page: content & markup (every page that matters)
9. The page answers its question in the first sentence. Answer first, context after — the answer-first technique is the single highest-leverage edit. The rewriter does the first draft.
10. Headings are questions people actually ask. H2s phrased the way users query ("How long does X take?") give extraction a target.
11. One claim per sentence, with specifics. Numbers, names, and dates get cited; vague generalities get skipped.
12. Sections stand alone. A paragraph that only makes sense with the three above it can't be quoted cleanly.
13. Lists and tables carry the comparisons. Structured facts get lifted into AI answers disproportionately — score your page's structure with the GEO Content Analyzer.
14. Topic coverage is complete. An authoritative answer mentions subtopics your draft may skip — find the gaps with the Entity & Topic Coverage Checker.
15. Page-level schema matches the content. Article with real dates; FAQPage where there's visible Q&A (does FAQ schema still matter? — short version: yes, differently). Generate with the FAQ or Article/HowTo generators.
16. The machine-read test passes. Run the AI Snippet Simulator: if the passage it would cite isn't the one you'd choose, restructure until it is.
Monthly: measurement (the feedback loop)
17. AI bots are visiting. Re-run your logs through the Log Analyzer. Zero GPTBot/PerplexityBot visits over weeks means an access problem crept in.
18. AI referrals are tracked and trending. A GA4 channel group for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com et al. — setup guide here. Note which landing pages win citations and make more like them.
19. Spot-check your money prompts. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini the three questions you most want to be the answer to. Cited? Great. Summarized without citation, or absent? Diagnose with why isn't my site in ChatGPT answers.
20. Dates and content are fresh. AI engines bias toward current sources. Update pages that earned citations, bump their dateModified, and keep llms.txt pointing at live URLs.
The order matters
Checks 1–8 are gates: perfect content behind a blocked crawler is invisible, and a beautiful llms.txt on a JavaScript-only site describes pages no bot can read. Checks 9–16 are where citations are actually won, page by page. Checks 17–20 close the loop — they turn GEO from a one-time cleanup into a compounding channel. If you only bookmark one page on this site, the 30-minute version of this list lives in our free GEO tools roundup; if you only run one tool, make it the AI-Readiness Audit.