The AI search SEO checklist

12 steps that determine whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews cite your site

AI search SEO is the work of making your website citable by AI engines. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question in your market, the engine reads a handful of sources and cites two to five of them. This checklist covers the 12 things that decide whether you are one of them. Work through it top to bottom: the early items unblock everything else.

This is the tactical companion to our generative engine optimisation (GEO) guide, which explains the full strategy behind each step. New to the term? Start with what is GEO?

Access: can AI engines reach you?

  1. Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt. Check that GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are not blocked. Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for a blanket Disallow: /. Blocked crawlers are the single most common reason sites are invisible to AI search.
  2. Add an llms.txt file. A plain-text file at your domain root that tells AI systems what your business does and which pages matter. It takes under 30 minutes and most sites do not have one.
  3. Fix crawl errors and speed. AI crawlers give up faster than Google's. Resolve 4xx and 5xx errors on key pages, keep load times low, and make sure important content renders without JavaScript.

Understanding: can AI engines interpret you?

  1. Add Organisation schema to your homepage: name, URL, logo, location and links to your profiles elsewhere on the web.
  2. Add Article and Person schema to your content: author, date and organisation on every substantial page, with real author bios behind them.
  3. Add FAQPage schema wherever you answer questions. Each question-and-answer pair is a ready-made citation.
  4. Say what you do in plain language. Your homepage's first paragraph should state what you do, where, and for whom. AI engines do not untangle vague positioning.

Content: are you worth citing?

  1. Lead every section with the answer. AI engines extract passages, not pages. Use question-format headings and put a direct, self-contained answer in the first sentence beneath each one.
  2. Publish specific, verifiable facts. Named statistics, concrete examples and original data get cited; generic summaries of what is already online do not.
  3. Answer the questions buyers actually ask. Cover the comparison and "best X for Y" questions in your market directly, because those are the prompts AI engines answer with recommendations.

Trust: why should AI engines pick you?

  1. Build consistent external signals. Reviews, directory listings and press mentions, with your name, address and details identical everywhere. AI engines cross-reference before they recommend.
  2. Measure, fix, re-measure. AI visibility shifts as models update. Baseline your score, ship the fixes above, and re-check monthly. Our methodology explains exactly what gets measured.

Run the checklist automatically

The free SearchScore scan checks all of the above, 250+ signals in total, and shows what to fix first. 60 seconds, no email.

Get my free scores

How AI search SEO differs from traditional SEO

Traditional SEO earns a position in a list of links; AI search SEO earns a citation inside a generated answer. There is no page two: you are either one of the handful of cited sources or you are absent. That changes the levers.

  • Citation over ranking: engines quote specific passages, so extractable structure beats keyword density
  • Entity understanding: engines evaluate your brand as an entity across the whole web, not one page at a time
  • Answer synthesis: your content competes to be the clearest single answer, not the most comprehensive page
  • Structured data: schema markup moves from nice-to-have to a primary interpretation layer

Your Google rankings still matter: several AI engines lean on search indexes to find candidate sources. But ranking well no longer guarantees being cited, which is why sites with identical rankings can have wildly different AI visibility. US readers: this practice is also called AI search optimization; same discipline, same checklist.

Check your visibility per engine

Each AI engine selects sources differently. Test where you stand on each:

Frequently asked questions

How long does AI search SEO take to work?

Access and schema fixes (steps 1 to 7) can change what AI engines see within days of the next crawl. Content restructuring shows up over weeks. Authority signals compound over months. Teams that ship the full checklist typically see citation improvements inside one to three months, with the biggest early wins on informational queries.

Do I need separate strategies for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews?

Mostly no. The fundamentals in this checklist serve every engine. The engines differ in where they source candidates: Perplexity does live retrieval on every query, Google AI Overviews leans on Google's index, and ChatGPT mixes trained knowledge with browsing. That affects how fast changes show up per engine more than what you should do.

Does traditional SEO still matter?

Yes. Several AI engines shortlist sources via conventional search indexes, so crawlability, indexation and authority still open the door. AI search SEO is a layer on top of solid SEO, not a replacement for it.

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