AI visibility checklist
This checklist covers the 14 things that decide whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews name your business. Work through it in order: let AI bots in, make each page open with the answer, keep your facts the same everywhere, get other sites to mention you, then count. Most items take under an hour.
Published · by the AnswerSeen team
- Step 1Let AI bots in
- Step 2Answer first on each page
- Step 3Same facts everywhere
- Step 4Get mentioned elsewhere
- Step 5Count the answers
Step 1: Can AI bots read your website?
AI engines can only name what their bots can read, so check access before you touch any wording. Three things block most small business websites: a robots file that refuses AI bots, text that only appears after the page runs code, and a security screen that asks visitors to prove they are human before showing normal pages.
Prices, areas, hours, all readable.
Blocked robots file, code-only text or a human check gives this.
- The robots file lets AI bots in. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. If it lists GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended with the word Disallow, ask your web person to remove those lines.
- Your text is in the page itself. In Chrome, right-click a page and choose View page source. If your prices and services are not in that text, the page is built by code after loading and most AI bots see nothing. Vercel's traffic analysis found the ChatGPT and Claude bots do not run that code at all.
- No human check on normal pages. A "verify you are human" screen stops bots too. Keep it for forms, not for your service pages.
- Every service page is in your sitemap, the list of pages at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, and Google Search Console shows no errors.
Source: Vercel, The rise of the AI crawler, December 2024, from traffic across the sites it hosts.
Step 2: Does each page answer a real question in its first lines?
An AI engine lifts sentences, not pages, and it favours the first lines of each section. Each page should carry one customer question as its heading and answer it in the first two sentences, with the number or name the buyer wants. Background, history and welcome messages go below the answer, never above it.
- One page per question your customers ask, in the words they use: pico laser price Penang, not Our services.
- The answer in the first two sentences of each section, 40 to 60 words, that makes sense on its own.
- Prices, areas, hours and turnaround as plain text, not only in an image, a PDF or a WhatsApp reply.
- Numbers and names instead of adjectives. "1,200 treatments in 2025" says more than "experienced". A Princeton-led study found that adding statistics and named sources raised how often AI drew on a page by about 30 to 40 percent.
- A page per language you sell in. An AI asked in Bahasa Malaysia picks from pages written in Bahasa Malaysia.
Source: GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, Aggarwal and others, Princeton University and others, 2024. Tested on 10,000 questions; the lift varies by question type.
Step 3: Are your facts the same everywhere?
AI engines cross-check your website against Google Business Profile, Facebook, directories and review sites. When your name, address, phone number, hours or prices differ between them, the AI either picks one version at random or leaves you out. The same facts everywhere is the cheapest fix on this list.
- Name, address, phone and hours match on your website, Google Business Profile, Facebook page and every directory that lists you. Same spelling, same unit number.
- Prices on the website match what you quote on WhatsApp. If prices vary, write the range and what changes it.
- Old listings are claimed or removed: a previous address or a closed branch still online will be repeated by AI.
Step 4: Do other sites mention you?
Most of what an AI engine says about a business comes from sites the business does not own. Reviews, directory listings, local news, supplier pages and forum threads all count, with or without a link. A business with clear pages but no outside mentions reads to the AI like a claim nobody has confirmed.
- Google reviews with replies. Ask every happy customer, and reply to each review in a sentence that names the service and the area.
- Listed in the directories your trade uses, with the same facts as Step 3.
- One mention a quarter from a site you don't own: a local news piece, a supplier's partner page, a trade association listing, or a customer's own post.
Step 5: Are you counting?
No click arrives when an AI names you, so your analytics will not show the result. The only way to know is to put your customers' questions to the AI engines yourself, several times a month, and count how many answers name you. Keep the same list of questions so the months compare.
- A written list of 5 to 25 customer questions, in the languages your customers use.
- Each question asked to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews several times a month, because AI rarely gives the same answer twice. Count named, and note who was named instead.
- Visits from AI assistants in your analytics, and searches for your business name in Google Search Console, checked monthly as a second signal.
What should I do first?
Do the steps in order, because each one is wasted if the one before it fails. A perfect page behind a blocked robots file is invisible. Step 1 takes an afternoon, Step 3 a day, and Steps 2 and 4 are ongoing work that compounds over months.
AnswerSeen does Step 5 for you every month and turns Steps 1 to 4 into 3 fixes at a time. The free check starts with 5 questions.
Related: What is AEO? · AEO vs SEO · How AnswerSeen works
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