Access: can AI engines reach you at all? (checks 1–3)
1. AI search crawlers are allowed. Check your robots.txt for the citation-producing bots — OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and Google-Extended. Blocking these is the single most common reason a site gets zero AI citations: the content is fine, the bot just never gets in.
2. Your content is in the HTML. Many AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript. If your text only appears after hydration, an AI engine sees an empty page. View your page source: if your main copy isn't there, neither is your AI visibility.
3. You publish llms.txt. An /llms.txt file is an emerging convention that hands AI agents a curated map of your most important content — cheap to add, and an early-adopter trust signal.
Structure: can they understand what they read? (checks 4–6)
4. Structured data (JSON-LD) is present. Schema markup lets engines read your facts and entities instead of guessing — Organization, Article, FAQPage and Product schemas are the workhorses.
5. Headings form a real outline. One H1, logical H2/H3 nesting, and headings that say what each section actually covers. AI engines pick which passage to quote by structure, not by design.
6. Content is chunked. Sections short enough to lift whole (under ~200 words), lists and tables for enumerable facts, and one idea per section beat a wall of text every time.
Quotability: is there anything worth citing? (checks 7–10)
7. Answers come first. Open each section with the direct answer — a definition, a number, a verdict — then elaborate. Models prefer content they can quote in one sentence.
8. Question-shaped headings. "Is my website ready for ChatGPT?" matches how people prompt; "Our approach to digital readiness" doesn't.
9. Concrete facts and dates. Quotable statistics, named entities and machine-readable publish dates give an engine something specific to attribute — and a reason to trust it's current.
10. Author and entity signals. A clear who-wrote-this, an about page, and schema whose entity matches your page title make attribution safe for the engine citing you.
Test it in 30 seconds
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