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Free · Print-ready · September 2026

The 2026 AI Search Visibility Checklist

Outerank · Agent Hei · 21 items

Twenty concrete items you can check on your own site in about an hour. Score yourself out of 20 to see whether AI engines CAN cite you today (readiness) — the second question, whether they DO cite you, needs a per-query check that only paid tools measure.

1 · Crawler access — can the engines read you at all?

  • robots.txt explicitly allows GPTBot (OpenAI/ChatGPT).
  • robots.txt explicitly allows OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search).
  • robots.txt explicitly allows PerplexityBot (Perplexity).
  • robots.txt explicitly allows Google-Extended (Gemini) and Googlebot.
  • Content is server-rendered (visible in curl view-source), not JS-only.

2 · Discovery — do the engines know what you are?

  • An llms.txt file exists at /llms.txt with your name, purpose and 5–10 key URLs.
  • Every important page has a self-referencing canonical tag.
  • Sitemap.xml is submitted in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
  • Every page has a unique meta title and meta description under 160 chars.

3 · Entity signals — do the engines trust who you are?

  • Organization schema (JSON-LD) on the homepage with logo, sameAs, contact.
  • Consistent brand name, address and phone across the site + Google Business Profile.
  • At least 5 third-party mentions (press, directories, guest posts) linking to your brand name.
  • Author schema on articles when a real named author wrote them.

4 · Content format — do LLMs pull your paragraphs?

  • Every H2 is phrased as a specific question a user might ask an AI.
  • The paragraph directly under each H2 leads with a self-contained 2–3 sentence answer.
  • FAQ schema (JSON-LD) on pages with a real Q&A block (8–10 pairs is the sweet spot).
  • At least one comparison-style page ("X vs Y") for your category.

5 · Freshness + measurement — do you know what's happening?

  • Every pillar article has a real dateModified schema updated on genuine edits (not on every deploy).
  • You track your brand name + top 3 buyer-intent queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini weekly.
  • You maintain a 20–50 prompt set for AI-visibility monitoring, not one-off audits.
  • You review results monthly and ship one on-page improvement based on gaps.

How to score yourself

Tick each item you honestly pass. 15+ / 20 = strong AI-search readiness. 10–14 = partial (you're crawlable but signals are thin). Under 10 = you're likely invisible to AI answers even if you rank on Google. The categories where you drop the most items tell you what to ship next.

Want this automated?

Outerank's free AI-search readiness scan runs the technical half of this checklist against your live site in 30 seconds. The Pro plan adds per-query citation monitoring across five engines — so you know not just whether AI CAN cite you, but whether they actually DO.

Run the free scan →

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