A printable, actionable checklist for making your website discoverable by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI agents. Each item is a yes/no check — no ambiguity, no guesswork.
We've audited 20 tech giants and 10 popular websites for AI-readiness. Here's everything we check, distilled into 20 yes/no items you can run through in under an hour.
Each item maps to one of the 7 categories in the AEO Checker scoring system. We've marked the impact level so you can prioritize: HIGH items move your score the most.
<script type="application/ld+json"> block with an Organization, Product, or SoftwareApplication schema? This is the single most impactful AEO factor — it gives agents explicit, structured information about your business.og:title, og:description, and og:type present? AI agents use these as quick summaries when parsing pages. They're also critical for social sharing and link previews.<meta name="description"> tag with a clear, concise summary (120-160 characters)? This is often the first thing agents read to decide if a page is relevant.twitter:card and twitter:title meta tags? Not high-impact for agents directly, but contributes to a complete metadata profile that signals a well-maintained site./robots.txt at your domain root? A missing or 404 robots.txt leaves agents uncertain about access permissions. See our robots.txt guide →Disallow rule. A blanket User-agent: * / Disallow: / blocks everything — including all AI agents.Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml directive? This helps AI crawlers discover all your pages efficiently./llms.txt accessible and returning valid content? This is the emerging standard for AI agent context — a plain-text file that tells agents what your business does, your products, and key URLs. Full creation guide →/llms-full.txt exist with detailed documentation? The full version supplements llms.txt with complete product descriptions, API documentation, and use cases.<h1> that clearly describes the page content? Agents use H1 as the primary signal for page topic identification.FAQPage JSON-LD schema? This is gold for AI agents — structured question-answer pairs they can directly use in responses.HowTo schema? Agents can extract and present step-by-step instructions directly from structured data./.well-known/ai-plugin.json exist? This OpenAI-originated standard tells agents your tool name, description, auth method, and API location.openapi.json or openapi.yaml spec? Agents can read OpenAPI specs to understand how to interact with your service programmatically.Accept: text/markdown, does your server return clean markdown instead of HTML? Cloudflare recently added this for all customers →/crawl return a markdown-formatted version of your site content? This is an emerging pattern — a dedicated endpoint for agents that returns clean, parseable text. Not standard yet, but early adopters score higher.Quick wins (30 minutes or less): Items #1, #5, #6, #8, and #11 can typically be implemented in under 30 minutes each and together account for 50+ points of your AEO score. Start there.
Step 1: Run a free AEO scan on your site to get your current score. This gives you a baseline and highlights which categories need work.
Step 2: Go through the checklist above, starting with HIGH impact items. Check each item against your live site.
Step 3: Fix the gaps. Most items are one-time changes — add a JSON-LD block, create an llms.txt file, update robots.txt. No ongoing maintenance required.
Step 4: Re-scan to verify. Your score should improve immediately for technical items (structured data, robots.txt, llms.txt). Content structure improvements may take a rescan to fully reflect.
Benchmark: The average score across the 20 top tech companies we scanned is 57/110. Only Sentry (88/110) scored Excellent. Getting to 70+ puts you ahead of Shopify, Atlassian, HubSpot, and even OpenAI.
Free AEO scan — all 7 categories, score out of 110, specific fix recommendations.
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