AI visibility checklist: 12 things AI engines need from your site

By The SignalUp Team · Updated August 4, 2026

This is the technical layer of the checklist SignalUp runs on every AI visibility audit. Work through it in order — the early items gate everything after them.

1. Content renders without JavaScript. Fetch each public page with curl; your real copy must be in the raw HTML. Most AI crawlers never execute JS. This single item disqualifies more sites than everything else combined.
2. robots.txt welcomes AI crawlers. Allow GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Extended, Amazonbot, Bingbot on public pages; disallow private areas.
3. llms.txt exists and is current. A machine-readable business summary at /llms.txt — see the llms.txt guide. Regenerate it when pricing changes.
4. Organization JSON-LD on every page: name, URL, logo, contact, sameAs links to your real profiles.
5. Product/Service JSON-LD with Offers. Real prices and currencies. Engines quote structured prices far more accurately than prose.
6. FAQPage JSON-LD on pages that answer questions — it maps your answers directly onto the question-shaped queries assistants receive.
7. One canonical host. Redirect stray hosts (www, hosting defaults like *.web.app) to one origin, with rel=canonical on every page.
8. Unique title + meta description per page, stated as answers to what buyers actually ask, not slogans.
9. Quotable claims. Every key fact — price, guarantee, differentiator — expressible as one standalone sentence an engine can lift verbatim.
10. Sitemap with real lastmod dates, referenced from robots.txt, covering only canonical, indexable URLs.
11. Fast recrawl paths. IndexNow for Bing/Copilot (instant), Google Search Console sitemap + URL inspection for Google. Recrawl latency is your fix-to-visibility latency for retrieval-augmented engines.
12. Off-site corroboration. Presence, accurately described, on the sources the engines already cite in your category (check what Perplexity cites for your buying queries). On-site work makes you parseable; corroboration makes you credible.

Then: measure

The checklist makes you visible; only measurement tells you if you're recommended. Ask the engines your buyers' questions on a schedule, track which brands are named and cited, and repair drift when it appears. That loop — measure, fix, re-measure — is the whole discipline. See What is AEO? and our methodology.