An AEO Checklist to Prepare Your Website for AI Search

Before you rewrite your service pages for AI search, find out whether search tools can read the pages you already have. A useful explanation of your prices won't help much if a security check blocks search tools from reading it.

That first check can save a lot of work. You may need to fix access, fill in missing customer information, or correct an old policy. You may also find pages that are doing their job and can stay as they are.

What AEO involves

AEO stands for answer engine optimization. It means making changes to help your information appear in answers, including AI search answers. For an existing business website, that starts with public pages that search tools can read and people can use. Google doesn't require a separate kind of AI page, special writing format, or special schema.

Work through the checks below in order. Record what you checked, what you found, and who will handle any repair. A completed item can mean that you checked something and left it alone.

Choose website pages for your AEO checklist

Match website pages to customer questions

Check the pages that help someone decide whether to do business with you before working through every post in the archive. These usually include pages about your main services, products, prices, and policies, along with detailed guides.

For each page, write down its URL and the question it should answer. A delivery page might answer where you deliver, what it costs, and when an order arrives. A service page might explain which jobs you take and what a quote includes. One page can answer several related questions.

Who is responsible for each page, and how is it performing?

Write down who is responsible for the information on each page. Your developer can fix a blocked page, but someone in the business needs to confirm that its delivery terms are right.

Before making changes, record your important pages and any relevant search or analytics results. That gives you something to compare later. You don't need a new page for every possible wording of a question.

Search access and indexing

1. Open the public page without signing in

Open each priority URL in a browser without signing in. Can you read the page without an account? Check for failed redirects and security challenges that prevent access.

Ask your administrator to check the final HTTP response, the status the server sends when someone requests the page. To meet Google's basic technical requirements, the public page needs a successful 200 response and content that Google can index. A page that returns 200 while displaying an error still needs attention.

Keep account pages and customer records private. Check that the information you intend to publish reaches the visitor.

2. Check indexing and Google's main page address

Paste the full URL into Search Console's URL Inspection tool. Read the indexed status and the Page indexing details. Check the canonical URL, the address Google treats as the main version when several pages contain similar material.

A different canonical URL can be intentional. If your print version points to the main article, that may be exactly what you want. Investigate when Google has chosen a different page from the one you intended.

After a repair, use Test live URL. The live test checks whether Google can currently fetch and potentially index the page. The indexed report tells you about Google's stored version. A successful live test doesn't mean indexing has already happened. You can request indexing after a useful repair without submitting the same unchanged page repeatedly.

3. Review indexing and snippet restrictions

Have your administrator inspect the page's robots meta tags and X-Robots-Tag response headers. These instructions can tell search engines whether to index content or show excerpts from it.

Look for unintended noindex or nosnippet instructions, especially after moving a site from testing to public hosting. For Google, nosnippet also prevents direct use of the content in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Other controls can limit particular excerpts. Review max-snippet and data-nosnippet where they appear. The check is complete when these instructions match what the owner wants. Keep restrictions that serve a real purpose.

4. Confirm Google's AI inclusion setting

In Search Console, open Settings > Search generative AI. Review the option labeled Include my site's links and content in Search generative AI features.

Inclusion is the default, and the setting may be inherited from a parent property. Check which setting applies to this property, because a setting on another property may affect it.

If you want your links and content to appear in Google's AI search features, confirm inclusion. You can choose to exclude them. This control is separate from ordinary Search ranking and from training preferences.

5. Review ChatGPT and Perplexity search access

Ask your administrator to check robots.txt, the public file that gives crawlers instructions about which paths they may visit.

For ChatGPT search, review OAI-SearchBot permissions and access from OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses. GPTBot handles potential model training separately. You can decline that training access while allowing search access.

For Perplexity, review PerplexityBot and its current published IP ranges. Perplexity describes this as a search crawler, separate from foundation-model training. Its user-triggered fetcher, Perplexity-User, has a different role.

Mark each service as allowed or intentionally restricted. You don't need to change a policy that already matches your decision.

6. Check that search crawlers can get through your firewall

A robots file that allows access doesn't prove a request gets through your security service. Ask the administrator to inspect security events and server logs for verified requests from search providers to your priority pages.

Check the response and the content delivered. Was the request blocked, redirected, or shown a browser challenge? Could the legitimate crawler retrieve the intended text?

Verify the bot with the provider's current guidance. A test request that only uses a crawler's name doesn't prove how the real crawler is treated. If access works, you can skip creating another firewall rule. If it fails, fix the specific access problem and test again.

Customer questions, business facts, and page links

7. Compare the page with Google's rendered view

In a successful live URL Inspection test, use View tested page to inspect the HTML and Screenshot. Compare what Google sees with what a visitor sees.

Look for the details that matter most, including prices, service areas, product specifications, and explanations. Important facts should be available as text. A screenshot of a price sheet is harder to reuse than a readable price explanation on the page.

Google can process JavaScript, so a script-driven page isn't automatically a problem. The rendered view shows what Google can read, though other search services may see something different. If other search services have trouble, have your administrator compare the initial HTML and server responses before deciding on a repair.

8. Check for answers to common customer questions

Collect recurring questions from sales conversations, support messages, site search, and relevant Search Console queries. Then try to find the answers on your chosen pages.

Have someone unfamiliar with the business do this too. Can they work out what the service costs, who it's for, what it includes, and what happens next? Give them a realistic question and let them find the answer without coaching.

A page about equipment rental, for example, may need to explain pickup requirements and deposits as well as its daily rate. Explain any conditions alongside the answer they affect.

Check that the page delivers what it promises. There is no required paragraph length or required share of headings that must be questions. You don't need to add an FAQ block when the page already answers the questions naturally.

9. Compare business facts across pages

Compare the homepage, About page, Contact page, and relevant service, product, and policy pages. Check the business identity, current offer, service area, prices, and terms.

Differences sometimes make sense. A service may be available in one location only. Say that on the page instead of leaving people to guess why two pages disagree.

If you're an eligible local business, compare your Google Business Profile details too, including hours and address or service area. Merchants should review relevant product feeds where they use them. Skip these tasks when they don't apply to the business.

10. Check claims and who is responsible for them

Review claims a customer might use to make a decision. Confirm quantities, dates, credentials, prices, and any limits attached to them. If a page promises a result, check that the evidence backs that particular promise.

Make it easy to tell who is responsible for the information. A business About page may do this well. A specialist article may benefit from a real author and relevant qualifications. Choose what helps the reader assess the information, and use credentials you can back up.

An updated date should reflect useful work on the content. Changing a date alone doesn't fix an old claim.

11. Check navigation, internal links, and your sitemap

Try to reach each priority page through your navigation and relevant links within other pages. Use labels that tell visitors where they're going.

Your administrator can check that these are real links with anchor elements and href values. A button that works only through a script may need a closer look.

If your content system supplies a sitemap, check that it works and lists the intended public URLs. A small, thoroughly linked site may not need a sitemap. Large or newly built sites may benefit more. Neither a sitemap nor a new internal link guarantees indexing.

Structured data, mobile pages, and outside listings

12. Review structured data already in use

Structured data gives machines labeled information about a page. If you use it for products, articles, or another supported search feature, check it with Google's Rich Results Test and compare its facts with the visible page.

Passing the test is only part of the job. The type must fit the content, and the page must meet the relevant policies. Remove outdated prices or unsupported claims from the markup when you correct the page.

You don't need special AI schema for Google AI search. Add markup for a useful, supported purpose rather than treating its absence as an automatic failure.

13. Test page readability and controls on a phone

Read your main pages on a real phone. Open the menu, follow links, and try the actions a customer needs to complete. Look for unreadable text, blocked controls, and dialogs that hide the information.

Use PageSpeed Insights or Chrome Lighthouse to investigate performance problems you've found. Fix the things that interrupt reading or prevent the page from working. You don't need a perfect score for AI citations, and there is no established loading-time limit that applies to every page selected for an AI answer.

14. Check business details on other websites

Check the genuine profiles, reviews, and industry listings customers are likely to find. Ask the site's owner to correct outdated business facts, or use the site's correction process. If you can't change another publisher's content, you can record the error and your correction request. Skip irrelevant directories, and don't manufacture forum recommendations or reviews to make it look as though independent sources support the business.

Record AEO fixes and check AI search results

Record each AEO fix and check that it works

For each repair, save the page address, date, change, and evidence that it worked. A successful fetch, corrected public price, or matching business profile is more useful than a general note saying the page was optimized.

AI search impressions, citations, and website visits

Review each report separately because they measure different things. Search Console's Generative AI performance report shows impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode. It offers breakdowns such as pages, countries, dates, and devices. It doesn't provide separate AI click or click-through-rate figures, and the report may be absent when there are too few impressions.

Bing Webmaster Tools offers AI Performance data for supported experiences, including citations and sampled grounding queries. Grounding queries are the searches used to find supporting material. Use this report to see how AI uses that material, rather than to track conventional search rankings.

In GA4, the AI Assistant channel groups recognized assistant visits. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode remain within Organic Search. Review visits alongside useful customer actions, such as a completed inquiry or purchase.

Repeat customer-question checks in AI search

You can also check a small set of customer questions using the same method each time. Record the wording, platform, date, settings, and cited pages so you can compare later checks. Repeat after meaningful changes and at an interval that fits how often the business changes.

Passing the checklist means search tools can read the intended pages and the pages contain useful information that AI search may consider. Keep the repair record. It will tell you what to investigate next if a page changes, a crawler loses access, or customers start asking a question the site doesn't answer yet.