This is the actual checklist our diagnosis engine runs on every submitted site — 21 checks across five categories, published here in full. You can work through it by hand in an afternoon, or run the free diagnosis and get the same result in minutes.
We publish it because a checklist you can verify beats a score you have to trust. Each item lists what to check, why it matters, and how to fix it.
How to use this checklist
Work in order. Category 1 failures (crawlability) make every later category irrelevant — if crawlers cannot reach your pages, nothing else matters. Within each category, fix critical items before cosmetic ones.
Scoring tip: mark each item pass, fail or unsure. Every "unsure" is effectively a fail — it means you do not control that part of your stack.
1. Crawlability — can machines reach your pages?
☐ 1.1 Pages return HTTP 200 to crawlers
Fetch your key pages with a plain HTTP client, not just a browser. Bot challenges and WAF rules often pass humans while returning 403 or 503 to crawlers. Fix: allowlist verified bot user agents in your CDN/WAF.
☐ 1.2 No redirect chains
One redirect is fine; chains of two or more waste crawl budget and dilute signals. Check with a header tracing tool. Fix: point every old URL directly at its final destination.
☐ 1.3 No broken internal links
A link that returns 404 tells both search engines and AI retrievers that your site is poorly maintained — and it dead-ends the crawl. Fix: crawl your own site quarterly; update or remove links to dead pages.
☐ 1.4 No unintended noindex
A stray noindex meta tag or HTTP header removes the page from both search and AI retrieval. Common after staging-to-production migrations. Fix: grep your templates for noindex and confirm it is intentional on every page that has it.
☐ 1.5 Canonical URLs present
Every page should declare its canonical URL. Without it, parameter variations and www/non-www duplicates split your authority. Fix: add <link rel="canonical"> pointing at the absolute preferred URL on every page.
2. Metadata — the text machines quote
☐ 2.1 Every page has a unique title
Duplicate titles across pages force machines to guess which page is authoritative. Fix: one title per page, unique across the site.
☐ 2.2 Title length is 10–60 characters
Too short fails to describe the page; too long gets truncated in results and diluted in retrieval. Fix: front-load the distinguishing words.
☐ 2.3 Every page has a unique meta description
AI answers frequently lift the meta description verbatim when summarizing a page. Fix: write it as the one-paragraph answer to "what is this page and who is it for".
☐ 2.4 Meta description length is 50–160 characters
Same reasoning as titles. Fix: one or two complete sentences; no keyword lists.
3. Structure — can machines parse the content?
☐ 3.1 Exactly one H1 per page
Zero H1s means the page's main claim is ambiguous; multiple H1s means competing claims. Fix: one H1 that states the page's primary subject.
☐ 3.2 Heading levels do not skip
H2 → H4 jumps break the document outline that both search engines and LLMs use to understand section hierarchy. Fix: never skip a level; restyle instead of misusing heading tags.
☐ 3.3 Images have alt text
Alt text is how visual content enters text-based retrieval. Fix: describe what the image shows, factually; skip decorative images with empty alt="".
☐ 3.4 Pages link outward internally
A page with no internal links is a crawl dead-end and an orphan for retrieval. Fix: every page should link to at least one related page — guides link to guides, articles link to tools.
4. Content — is there anything worth citing?
☐ 4.1 No thin pages
Pages with very little text give models nothing to quote. "Thin" is usually under ~200 words of body content. Fix: consolidate thin pages into stronger ones, or expand them with the specific facts only you can provide.
☐ 4.2 Pages contain answerable statements
Not a separate rule in our engine, but the reason most fixes fail: a page must contain sentences that directly answer a buyer's question. Fix: for each key page, write the one question it should win, and make sure the literal answer exists in the text.
5. AI readiness — the GEO layer
☐ 5.1 robots.txt does not block AI crawlers
Check https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt for Disallow rules targeting GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and CCBot — including a blanket User-agent: * block. Fix: explicitly allow the crawlers you want visibility from, per bot, so the choice is deliberate.
☐ 5.2 An llms.txt exists at the domain root
/llms.txt is your machine-readable fact sheet: who you are, what you sell, which pages matter. Not a confirmed ranking factor, but the cheapest authoritative signal you can publish. Fix: generate a draft with our llms.txt generator, fact-check every line, and publish it at the domain root.
☐ 5.3 llms.txt matches your pages
A fact sheet that contradicts your pricing page creates exactly the inconsistency that produces AI hallucinations about your brand. Fix: update llms.txt whenever pricing, product scope or positioning changes.
☐ 5.4 Key pages expose structured data
JSON-LD (Organization, WebSite, Product/SoftwareApplication, FAQPage, Article) exposes facts you already publish in a form machines parse reliably. It creates nothing new — it makes existing facts unambiguous. Fix: start with Organization + WebSite site-wide, Product on pricing, FAQPage where you have real Q&A.
The scoring reality
In our diagnosis data, the failures cluster predictably:
- Most common: missing llms.txt and blocked AI crawlers — invisible problems nobody checks because classic SEO tools do not look for them.
- Most damaging: crawler 403s and unintended noindex — the site is absent from the evidence set entirely.
- Most underestimated: thin content with no answerable statements — technically healthy pages that still never get cited.
A site that passes categories 1–3 but fails 4–5 is invisible to AI while ranking fine in classic search. That gap — searchable but not recommendable — is the defining SEO problem of this decade, and it does not appear in any traditional audit.
Run it automatically
This checklist is the rule set of our audit engine. The free diagnosis runs all 21 checks against your live site in minutes, adds AI visibility sampling across engines, and shows you exactly which items fail — with the evidence. For a point check, the AI visibility checker tests one buyer question against every configured AI engine.