the AI search readiness checklist

This is the checklist we run on every site we look at, twenty checks across four areas. Score yourself honestly: each check is either true or it isn't, and the gaps are your work plan, in priority order, top to bottom.

One: your site is verified in Google Search Console with the sitemap submitted. Two: your key pages show as indexed when inspected. Three: your robots file allows the major AI crawlers rather than blocking them by accident. Four: every page loads fast and works on a phone. Five: each page has a truthful title, description and canonical address. If any of these five fail, fix them before touching anything below, because everything else is invisible until they pass.

Six: you have one page per real buying question, not one page gesturing at everything. Seven: every such page answers its question completely in the first two sentences. Eight: each section of each page makes sense read alone, with the subject named. Nine: your key claims carry a number, a source or a concrete example in the same breath. Ten: a named human author with a real bio stands behind your substantive pages. Eleven: your pages carry article, organization and FAQ structured data where each honestly applies. Twelve: nothing on the site still reads like keyword stuffing, which now scores below writing nothing.

Thirteen: your business is described identically, name, offer, place, on your site, your directories and your profiles. Fourteen: reviews arrive steadily somewhere public, and get replies. Fifteen: your founders or experts are visible and consistent on at least one professional platform. Sixteen: at least a handful of third-party pages describe your business accurately without you having written them. Seventeen: if your brand shares its name with others, every mention travels with disambiguating context.

Eighteen: you have a written list of the ten questions your buyers actually ask. Nineteen: you put those questions to the major assistants on a monthly schedule and log who gets named. Twenty: your analytics can show you AI referral visits and branded search movement. Measurement is three checks out of twenty and it is the difference between a strategy and a hope.

A checklist tells you where you stand, not how far the walk is. Some checks are an afternoon and some are a quarter of steady work, and a perfect score guarantees eligibility rather than victory, because your competitors are walking too. What the list does promise: every check you turn true makes you easier to find, understand, trust and quote, and nothing on it is wasted even if AI search changes shape next year.