AI SEO / GEO checklist for small sites

1. Access: can the engines reach you?

• robots.txt doesn’t block the crawlers you want citations from. Check the user agents OpenAI and Perplexity publish, plus Googlebot.
• Your CDN or firewall’s bot protection isn’t silently blocking those crawlers. Test with the documented user agents if your provider allows it.
• Key pages return a 200 status and render their main text in the initial HTML.
• There’s no login wall, cookie wall, or full-screen pop-up covering the main content.
• You have an XML sitemap listing your important pages, and it’s referenced in robots.txt.

2. Pages: is each answer easy to quote?

• Each priority question has one dedicated page.
• The H1 or first H2 matches the question in plain language.
• A direct two-to-four sentence answer sits right under that heading.
• Steps are numbered, comparisons are in a small table, and definitions are one or two sentences.
• Facts you state, such as prices, limits, and dates, are current and specific.
• Each page has a unique title tag and meta description that describe what it answers.
• Headings run in order (H1, then H2, then H3), and images have descriptive alt text.

3. Entity: is it clear who you are?

• Your brand name and a one-line description are identical across your site, social profiles, and directory listings.
• An About page states what you do, who for, and where, in plain words.
• Organization structured data is on the homepage, with your name, URL, and logo.
• Authors are named on articles, with a short bio that explains their experience.
• Products or services have their own pages with clear names and prices where you can share them.

4. Mentions: are you on the pages engines already trust?

• For each priority question, you have a list of the domains AI engines currently cite.
• You’ve checked which of those pages mention competitors but not you.
• You’ve contacted the authors of relevant roundups with a short, factual pitch.
• Your profiles on the review sites and directories that show up in answers are complete.
• Where it’s appropriate and disclosed, you’ve answered relevant community threads.

5. Content quality: would a person cite this?

A good test is to ask whether a knowledgeable person would link to the page when answering a colleague. If the honest answer is no, an AI engine probably won’t either.

• The page includes something original: a worked example, a real screenshot, a template, or first-hand testing notes.
• It doesn’t pad. Every section helps someone get the answer or act on it.
• Claims you make are either your own experience or are linked to a source you checked.
• It’s updated when the facts change, with a visible “last updated” date.

6. Measurement: do you know if it’s working?

• You run your priority questions through Perplexity and ChatGPT on a schedule. Weekly is enough for most small sites.
• For each run you record whether you were cited, named without a link, or absent, and who was cited instead.
• You note the date of every page change so you can line it up with citation changes.
• You watch referral traffic from AI assistants in your analytics, keeping in mind that some of it arrives without a referrer.

7. Technical extras worth a few minutes

None of these replace the sections above, but they’re cheap to add and they make your site easier for machines to read.

• Canonical tags on every page, so duplicate URLs don’t split signals.
• Open Graph tags, so links to your pages show a clear title and description wherever they’re shared.
• An llms.txt file at your root with a short plain-text summary of your site and links to its key pages. It’s an emerging convention with no guarantee that any engine reads it, so keep it short and accurate.
• FAQPage or Article structured data where it truly matches the content on the page.

How to prioritize

If you only have an afternoon, do section 1 completely, then rewrite the top of your three most important pages to match section 2. Those two steps fix the most common reasons a small site never gets cited. Then set up the measurement in section 6 so you can see whether the next round of work is paying off.