Checklist
AI-discoverability checklist
Before generative engines can cite you, they must be able to fetch your pages, render them, and understand them. This checklist covers the mechanical prerequisites most sites get wrong.
01Access
- Decide your policy on AI crawler user-agents and reflect it accurately in robots.txt — neither blanket-blocking what you want included nor allowing what you don't.
- Key content is server-rendered or progressively enhanced, not locked behind client-side-only rendering.
- Pages return proper status codes; soft-404s and JS-only error states confuse retrieval.
02Parseability
- Semantic HTML: real headings, lists, tables — meaning carried by structure, not divs.
- Important statements appear as text, not baked into images.
- Structured data matches visible content and validates cleanly.
03Attribution readiness
- Clear titles and bylines so citations can be labeled correctly.
- Stable URLs for evergreen claims.
- Publish date and update dates exposed in metadata.