This checklist mirrors the structure of a professional AI visibility audit. Use it to assess any site — your own, a vendor’s target, or a competitor’s. Each item is verifiable; if an item cannot be checked with available access, mark it unknown rather than guessing.

Crawlability and access

  • AI crawler user agents (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) reach key pages
  • robots.txt does not accidentally exclude AI crawlers
  • Key pages render meaningful server-side HTML (not only after JavaScript)
  • Sitemap exists, is referenced in robots.txt, and contains only canonical 200 URLs
  • No orphaned or isolated important pages

Entity clarity

  • Brand name and legal name are consistent across the site
  • Organization schema (or equivalent) is present on the site
  • Services, products and locations are declared as schema entities
  • Third-party mentions describe the brand consistently
  • No obvious homonym confusion with unrelated entities

Content structure

  • Priority pages answer their target question in the first paragraph
  • Factual claims are specific and quotable (numbers, named sources)
  • Heading structure is semantic (single H1, logical hierarchy)
  • No duplicate or near-duplicate pages competing for the same intent
  • Authorship is attributable for expertise-bearing content

Authority signals

  • Named authors with credentials exist for editorial content
  • Original research or proprietary data exists (if relevant to the market)
  • Links from credible, relevant properties are present
  • No spammy or purchased link patterns that could poison trust
  • Company information (about, contact, legal) is complete and accurate

Measurement readiness

  • A prompt portfolio exists for the brand’s market
  • Baseline citation rate has been measured per engine
  • Monitoring is repeatable (fixed prompts, version capture, monthly runs)
  • Reporting includes raw data, not just scores

Outcomes [see the structured data methodology

Score the checklist honestly and map failures to workstreams: crawlability failures → technical work; entity failures → entity optimisation; content failures → content restructure; authority failures → PR and citation building; measurement failures → tooling. The AI visibility audit service delivers this checklist as a scored, prioritised report; the implementation playbook sequences the fixes.