A 20-point AI search visibility checklist

Mark each item as complete, needs work or not applicable. Add a responsible person and a verification date. A short initial review can expose obvious problems, but checking access, data and answers properly may require help from your website team. There is no score here that guarantees a mention, citation or ranking.

Make important pages accessible

1. Check live responses. Your principal service and contact pages should load successfully for ordinary visitors. Resolve persistent errors and accidental authentication barriers before adding more content.
2. Review indexing controls. Check robots.txt, page-level noindex directives and canonical URLs. A page blocked from crawling and a page excluded from indexing are different problems.
3. Choose crawler access deliberately. Identify search crawlers separately from training crawlers. OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot as different controls; allowing training is not a prerequisite for allowing its search crawler. OpenAI crawler documentation.
4. Keep the sitemap accurate. Include the canonical public URLs you want discovered. Remove redirects, deleted pages and private environments. Register the site with the relevant search webmaster tools.
5. Test mobile usability and HTTPS. Check navigation, readable text, forms and certificate errors on a phone. These are customer experience checks, not a special AI visibility certification.

For the access rules in item three, use our AI crawler robots.txt guide. Your hosting or firewall team may need to check whether bot protection contradicts the file.

Describe the business accurately

6. Publish a clear company identity. State your trading name and the legal organisation behind it, with the relevant registration and contact details.
7. Keep facts consistent. Compare the homepage, footer, contact page, terms and current downloadable documents. Fix conflicting prices, addresses and service claims.
8. Describe actual coverage. Say where you deliver services. Do not imply local offices in every European city when your team is based in one country.
9. Use appropriate structured data. Organisation markup should reflect visible, verifiable facts. Add other types only when they fit the page. Validate both syntax and meaning.
10. Maintain authentic external profiles. Update the business profiles and professional directories you actually use. Link to your own profiles, not loosely related entities.

Our Organisation schema guide covers the distinction between a brand and its legal operator. An encyclopedia entry or Wikidata identifier is not a universal prerequisite for being found.

Make your content useful to a buyer

11. Answer the main question early. State what the service does, who it is for and the next practical step without a long promotional introduction.
12. Explain prices honestly. Publish current prices where suitable. If work is quoted individually, explain the factors that affect scope rather than inventing a fixed price.
13. Support important claims. Link to primary evidence for technical assertions and show the limits of your own research.
14. Connect related pages. Link a guide to the relevant service and the next useful explanation. Descriptive links help visitors navigate a topic.
15. Maintain each language version. Translate navigation, metadata and important terms consistently. Give each language its own URL and keep corresponding pages aligned after updates.

There is no minimum number of blog posts that creates authority. A small, accurate guide can be more useful than a large collection of repetitive pages.

Observe actual answers

16. Write a fixed set of test questions. Include your brand, generic service questions and relevant locations. Avoid leading wording that asks the assistant to praise you.
17. Record the conditions. Save the product, date, language, location where known, search mode and exact prompt. Use fresh conversations for comparable tests.
18. Distinguish mentions from citations. A brand name in an answer is different from a link to your website. Record the cited URL and whether it supports the claim.
19. Check factual accuracy. Flag incorrect prices, invented services and confused identities. Use the AI misinformation correction guide for follow-up.
20. Connect observations to enquiries. Track measurable visits and qualified leads where possible. Report small samples and missing attribution rather than presenting prompt results as market share.

Turn the checklist into work

Fix unavailable pages and contradictory facts first. Next improve thin service explanations and internal links. Treat optional experiments such as llms.txt as lower priority than keeping the public website useful.

Our measurement guide turns repeat checks into a simple report. Managed WordPress maintenance can provide an accountable technical foundation, while content and search measurement should have an explicitly agreed scope.