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AI visibility checklist: 15 checks before you blame your SEO agency

20 June 2026 · Zeb Choudhry

If your business is not appearing in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews answers, the cause is almost always one of a small set of fixable problems. Before assuming your SEO strategy needs a complete overhaul, work through this checklist. Most businesses that score poorly on AI visibility fail on fewer than five of these fifteen checks — and fixing those five changes outcomes significantly.

• 1

  Your robots.txt does not block AI crawlers

  Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Check that PerplexityBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and anthropic-ai are not blocked — either explicitly or via a broad User-agent: * Disallow: / rule. A block here means no AI system can index or cite your pages.

• 2

  Your key pages do not require JavaScript to render

  Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript. If your page content (especially your About, Services, or Homepage content) only appears after JS runs, crawlers see a blank page. Test by disabling JS in your browser — can you still read the main content?

• 3

  Your pages load fast enough for crawlers to not time out

  Pages that take over 5 seconds to first byte are frequently abandoned by crawlers before content is received. Check your server response time — hosting quality matters here more than most SEO advice acknowledges.

• 4

  You have an llms.txt file

  Not required, but a positive signal. Visit yourdomain.com/llms.txt — a 200 response with plain-text content means you have one. A 404 means you should create one. It takes about 10 minutes and gives AI crawlers a direct machine-readable summary of who you are.

• 5

  Your homepage states clearly what you do in the first sentence

  AI systems extract entity descriptions from the most prominent content on a page. If your homepage hero text says "We help you win" without stating the industry, product, or geography — that is an entity clarity failure. Your first sentence should identify what you do and who for.

• 6

  Your business name is identical across all platforms

  Check that your company name is exactly the same on your website, Google Business Profile, Trustpilot, LinkedIn, and Companies House (or your national registry). Even small variations ("Ltd" vs "Limited", "The" prefix/suffix) create entity ambiguity.

• 7

  Your address and phone number are consistent everywhere

  NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency is a direct trust signal for local AI queries. Check Google Business Profile, your Contact page, your footer, and your schema markup all show the same address in the same format.

• 8

  You have Organization or LocalBusiness schema on your homepage

  View your homepage source and search for application/ld+json. You should find an Organization or LocalBusiness block with at minimum: name, url, description, and contactPoint. Missing schema is the single most common AI visibility gap.

• 9

  Your Organization schema includes sameAs links

  The sameAs property links your entity to external profiles (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Wikidata). Without it, your entity only exists on your own domain. AI systems use sameAs to corroborate that your business is real and established.

• 10

  Your schema has no validation errors

  Run your homepage URL through validator.schema.org. Fix any critical errors — missing required properties, incorrect types, or malformed JSON all prevent the schema from being processed. Warnings are lower priority.

• 11

  Your key pages answer the most common customer questions directly

  AI systems serve answers. Pages that ask questions and then answer them clearly (FAQ sections, "How does X work?" headers followed by direct explanations) are far more likely to be extracted than pages that describe rather than explain.

• 12

  Your paragraphs are short enough to stand alone as extracted quotes

  A passage that only makes sense in context of the surrounding five paragraphs is difficult to cite. Review your most important pages: could any paragraph be pulled and quoted standalone without losing its meaning? Restructure if not.

• 13

  You have an active review profile on at least one major platform

  Google reviews, Trustpilot, and industry-specific review sites are directly cited by Perplexity and influence AI Overview source selection. A business with no public reviews has no corroboration that it exists and is legitimate.

• 14

  At least one credible external source mentions your business

  A press mention, industry directory listing, or professional body membership is the highest-trust corroboration signal available. A business that only mentions itself has no external validation. Even a single local newspaper article naming your business significantly improves trust scoring.

• 15

  Your content has visible publication dates

  AI search products that use live retrieval (Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) weight freshness heavily. Pages without visible dates are often treated as potentially stale. Add datePublished and dateModified to your Article schema and show last-updated dates visibly on key pages.

How to score yourself

13–15 checks passing: Strong AI visibility foundations. Focus on content depth and external trust building.

9–12 checks passing: Moderate visibility. Fix the schema and entity signal gaps first — they are highest leverage.

5–8 checks passing: Significant gaps. Prioritise crawler access (checks 1–4) then entity signals (checks 5–7) before anything else.

0–4 checks passing: AI systems cannot reliably index, understand, or cite your site. Start with robots.txt and schema.