AEO Readiness Checklist

22 checks to know your page is ready to be quoted by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude. Covers crawlability, direct-answer formatting, schema, entity signals, and freshness.

1. 1. GPTBot allowed in robots.txtCritical

   Explicit Allow rule, not just missing Disallow.

2. 2. PerplexityBot allowed in robots.txtCritical

   Perplexity is the most citation-generous engine.

3. 3. ClaudeBot allowed in robots.txtImportant

   Anthropic's crawler for training and search.

4. 4. Google-Extended allowedCritical

   Controls Google AI Overviews and Gemini training.

5. 5. llms.txt present at rootImportant

   Markdown index of your canonical pages for LLMs.

6. 6. H1 is a question or noun phraseCritical

   Not a marketing tagline.

7. 7. 40-80 word direct answer in first paragraphCritical

   Extractable, self-contained, no throat-clearing.

8. 8. FAQPage or HowTo schema presentCritical

   3.1× citation lift on average.

9. 9. Article schema with author + datesCritical

   datePublished and dateModified in ISO 8601.

10. 10. Speakable schema on the direct answerImportant

    cssSelector pointing at your answer div.

11. 11. Organization schema with sameAsCritical

    LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Crunchbase, GitHub.

12. 12. Author page with Person schemaImportant

    Real bio, real photo, real sameAs links.

13. 13. Breadcrumb schema on every deep pageImportant

    Helps engines understand site hierarchy.

14. 14. Internal links to related answersImportant

    Signals topical authority to LLMs.

15. 15. External citations to authoritative sourcesImportant

    LLMs favor pages that themselves cite well.

16. 16. Named entities and specific numbersImportant

    '43% of B2B searches' beats 'many searches'.

17. 17. Page loads in under 2.5s LCPImportant

    Slow pages are skipped by some AI crawlers.

18. 18. Mobile-friendly, no CLS shiftsImportant

    Same URL, same content, same schema.

19. 19. Canonical tag is absolute HTTPS URLCritical

    Prevents duplicate-content confusion.

20. 20. og:title and og:description unique per pageImportant

    Never share the site-wide default.

21. 21. dateModified updated when facts changeImportant

    Freshness is a top-3 citation signal.

22. 22. Tracked in AI Citation Tracker weeklyNice to have

    You can't improve what you don't measure.