The 12-Point AI Search Readiness Checklist.
The same items I check first when I open a new audit. None of these will get you cited — but skipping them will get you ignored. Each one takes about 15 minutes.
You can DIY the whole list. The harder part — reading what AI actually says about your business, hand-verifying every quote, and mapping your real competitor set — is where the audit comes in.
Make AI find you.
If retrieval bots can’t reach your pages, none of the rest matters. Four foundations.
Most sites block crawlers without realizing they’re also blocking the bots that fetch live answers for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. If those bots can’t crawl, your content can’t be cited — even if a model technically knows your brand.
yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Allow at minimum: OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Google-Extended. If you’re unsure what to block, allow all of them — you can tighten later.A short, structured map of what your site offers and where the canonical pages live. Treat it as a small README for AI engines — not a spec, just a signal that you’re ready to be read.
yourdomain.com/llms.txt. Lead with: business name, a one-line description, and 5–10 bullets pointing to your most important pages with one-line descriptions. Bonus: add an llms-full.txt with the full text of those pages.A sitemap tells crawlers what exists, when it changed, and which pages matter. AI engines use the same signals search engines use — if your sitemap is missing or stale, fresh content gets discovered slower.
yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml returns valid XML and lists every published page. Most CMSs (WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, Squarespace) generate this for you — just verify it’s referenced in your robots.txt with a Sitemap: line.Structured data is the most reliable way to tell an AI engine your name, what you do, where you operate, and how you connect to your other profiles — in a format the engine doesn’t have to guess at.
Organization (or LocalBusiness if you serve a region) script in the <head>. Required fields: name, url, logo, sameAs (an array of your social, review, and Wikipedia profiles), description. Validate at validator.schema.org.Make AI quote you.
Discoverable isn’t enough. AI answers favor pages it can lift a clean sentence out of.
Engines pull the first 1–2 sentences of a relevant chunk and quote it. If your opening paragraph is a marketing windup, you’re handing the citation slot to someone with a tighter intro.
Engines extract content from semantic tags (main, article, section, h1–h3, ul, ol) more reliably than from generic div stacks. It’s the difference between handing them a labeled folder and a pile of paper.
<main> and <article>? Are the headings real <h1>/<h2> tags or styled divs? If everything is div class="heading", it’s costing you.FAQs are the format AI engines understand best — question header, direct answer, repeat. This is the single highest-leverage content shape for AI visibility.
FAQPage JSON-LD or use plain <details>/<summary> tags — both work.AI answers love specifics. “We’ve served Seattle homeowners since 2014” quotes cleaner than “trusted local provider for years.” Vague claims rarely make it into citations; specifics often do.
Make AI trust you.
Most AI citations come from third-party sources, not your site. Get on the right ones — and look the same on each.
AI engines lean heavily on review aggregators when answering category questions. An unclaimed Yelp or G2 profile is a free win for your competitors — the AI defaults to whoever’s actively present.
If you’re “Acme Co.” on your homepage, “Acme Cleaning” on Yelp, and “Acme Inc.” on your invoices, AI engines will sometimes count those as three different businesses — and split your visibility across all three.
A single mention in a “Best [your category] in [your city/segment]” post by a respected source moves the needle more than a month of on-site SEO. AI engines are pattern-matchers — if three trusted lists mention you, you’re a recommendation.
AI engines weight expertise signals heavily — named people, real credentials, years in the field. A faceless About page reads as untrustworthy. A specific one (“Owen Kurth, 8 years in service operations”) reads as legitimate.
Person JSON-LD with jobTitle, worksFor, and sameAs linking to LinkedIn. If you have certifications or licenses, name them on the page.You’ve handled the easy 80%. The other 20% is what BeCited does.
What this checklist can’t do: read what AI actually says about your business across all four engines, hand-verify every quote, separate real competitors from national chains, and trace each gap back to its root cause. That’s the BeCited Full Audit — 100–300 buying-intent prompts, four engines, one named analyst, one week.