The first pass we run to see if AI engines can find, trust, and cite your site. The same one we ran across a 15-site finance portfolio.
Every check below has three buttons. Click one on each of the 20 checks: zero means missing, one means partial, two means solid. Your running total out of 40 and your verdict update live in the bar at the top as you go. Three questions decide everything an engine does with a page, can it find you, will it trust you, can it quote you.
Technical and crawlability. The floor. If the engine cannot fetch and index a clean page, nothing else matters.
Load the page with JS disabled, or use view-source. If the main content is missing, most AI crawlers see nothing. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot read raw HTML and do not run JavaScript. Google and Gemini are the exception. This one is underrated.
Check robots.txt and firewall rules for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and Bingbot. Many hosts block these by default and nobody notices. Robots.txt is the real control here, not llms.txt.
Index coverage is the gatekeeper, because ChatGPT and Copilot lean on Bing's index and Gemini leans on Google's. No orphan pages, a real internal link path to every page, and an XML sitemap with accurate lastmod dates.
No 4xx or 5xx errors on key pages, and a fast, reliable server response when a bot hits the site. An uncrawlable page is an uncitable page. Core Web Vitals help humans, but there is no evidence they drive AI citation, so do not spend your energy there for this.
Entity, authority, and earned media. This is the center of gravity in 2026, and it lives mostly off your own site.
The single highest-impact factor in 2026. Are you being written about, mentioned, and cited on reputable third-party sites, not just your own? If AI is not reading you in the coverage, it is not naming you in the answer.
Wikipedia and Wikidata for entity grounding, plus Reddit, YouTube, and the review sites in your category. Reddit is the most-cited domain across the major engines. A real, earned presence on these beats anything you can publish on your own site.
Not admin, not staff. A real person with a bio, a track record, external profiles, and third-party bylines that let an engine confirm they exist.
Structured data that tells engines who you are and connects your site to your other official profiles and your knowledge-graph entry. Treat this as entity clarity, not a magic citation lever. Use it to remove ambiguity, not as the strategy.
State a fact, cite a named reputable source, and make sure the same fact shows up on other independent sites. Engines prefer claims they can safely repeat and cross-check.
Same name, same founder, same details on Wikidata, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and directories.
Original data, first-hand detail, and specifics a generic AI article would never contain. Adding real statistics is one of the two highest-lift on-page changes there is.
Content structure and citability. Give the engine a clean, self-contained answer it can lift and attribute.
The direct answer sits in the first two sentences under each heading, before the throat-clearing, in about 50 to 70 words. This is the strongest on-page citation driver.
The way a person actually prompts an engine. Question-format queries trigger an AI answer about 86% of the time, and your headings should match those sub-questions.
This is the one schema type with citation evidence. Skip FAQ and Article rich-result markup for this purpose, Google deprecated FAQ rich results in May 2026 and there is no citation lift from generic Article schema.
Short paragraphs, lists, and tables. Engines lift clean, self-contained passages, so give them clean units to lift.
A true dateModified in the schema and genuinely updated facts, not just a changed date. About 65% of AI crawler hits target content under a year old. Stale pages get skipped.
No two pages fighting over the same query. Focus aids passage extraction and entity clarity.
Google's AI surfaces break one query into eight to twelve sub-queries. Cover the sub-intents with a real hub-and-spoke cluster and internal links, not one keyword page.
A data study, a calculator, a comparison table, a directory, and a YouTube video. YouTube is one of the most-cited sources and often surfaces for sub-queries your text never ranks for. Give the engine something it cannot get anywhere else.
Bing Webmaster Tools for citation counts on the Copilot and Bing surface, GA4 for referral traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the rest, and a per-engine citation tracker. If you are not tracking it, you are flying blind.
Most AI SEO advice sells these three as levers. Current evidence says they are not, at least not for getting cited. We would rather you know.
Score all 20 above and your band lights up here, and at the top, live.
Now you have scored your site, here is the research the checklist is built on. Getting cited is a different game from ranking, and the center of gravity has moved off your own site.
This is the fast first pass. If you want the deep read, we will run our full AI-Visibility Audit on your site, free. It scores your site across 8 dimensions and 5 AI engines, and hands you the three highest-impact fixes, whether or not we ever work together.