· 2 min read
The AI search readiness checklist
Twelve checks on whether an AI assistant can find, understand and cite your brand. Work through them in order; the early ones gate the later ones.
Why a checklist rather than a strategy
AI search visibility is mostly the compound result of things you either did or did not do. Unlike ranking, where judgement and competition dominate, most of the failure modes here are binary. This is the order to check them in, because the early items gate the later ones.
Access
One. Confirm which AI crawlers your robots.txt allows. Search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot) govern whether you appear in AI search answers. Training crawlers (GPTBot and ClaudeBot) govern whether your content trains models, and the Google-Extended token covers Gemini. How to audit your robots.txt for AI crawlers explains each one.
Two. Check that your key pages return content without JavaScript. In Vercel's analysis of AI crawler traffic (December 2024), the crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity did not render it.
Three. Confirm your server, CDN or firewall does not block or rate-limit the crawlers your robots.txt allows. Cloudflare changed its default to block AI crawlers on 1 July 2025, so a platform setting can override the file.
Understanding
Four. Organization schema with a consistent legal name, logo and sameAs links.
Five. Product or Service schema on the pages that sell, matching the visible text. Google says its AI features need no special schema, so the value of Four and Five is clarity for any system that reads the page.
Six. One unambiguous page per entity: if three pages describe the same service, a model has to guess which is canonical, and so does Google.
Answerability
Seven. Each key page answers its primary question in its opening paragraph, in plain sentences rather than a windup.
Eight. Specific figures with sources attached. In a 2024 study by researchers at Princeton and IIT Delhi, adding statistics, quotations and citations raised a page's visibility in AI-generated answers by up to 40%.
Nine. Headings that ask the real question rather than a keyword fragment.
Corroboration
Ten. Your key claims appear somewhere other than your own site.
Eleven. Your brand name is consistent everywhere, because a variant can read as a different entity.
Twelve. Reviews and third-party mentions exist on the sources that AI answers in your category cite. Check which sources those are before you decide where to invest.
How to use it
Score each as done, partial or absent. Work top to bottom rather than by apparent difficulty. There is no point tuning answerability on pages a crawler is being blocked from reading.
Related discipline