The AI Search (AEO/GEO) Checklist

The checklist

• Answer-first: a 1–2 sentence direct answer at the very top of the page.
• Headings phrased as the questions buyers type (H2/H3).
• Evidence: add a number, a named quote and a cited source per section.
• Entity consistency: identical name, services, pricing and contact across every page.
• Structured data: Organization, WebSite, Product/Offer, FAQPage — accurate, not stuffed.
• Crawlable HTML: content must render server-side (AI crawlers don't run JS).
• Let the bots in: allow GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended.
• Freshness: update key pages every few months and show the date.

What not to do

• Don't keyword-stuff — it performed below baseline in the GEO benchmark.
• Don't create a separate page for every query variation — Google treats that as spam.
• Don't hide the answer in tabs, images or a PDF.

Measurement

• Search Console → Performance (Web search) + the Generative AI report.
• Bing Webmaster Tools → AI Performance (citations + grounding queries).
• Track a fixed set of buyer prompts monthly across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.

Schema checklist

• Organization + WebSite on the homepage.
• Product + Offer on every product page.
• FAQPage wherever you answer questions.
• Article + author on blog posts.
• BreadcrumbList on category and detail pages.
• SoftwareApplication for tools and repos.

Internal linking rules

• Every page links to its parent category.
• Detail pages link to 3–6 related items.
• Use descriptive anchors, not "click here".
• Keep the click depth under three from the homepage.
• Link once per target per page; repetition does not help.

30-day measurement plan