There is a frustrating way to lose at AI search: you do everything right on the page, but the crawlers never see it. No access means no citations, no matter how good your content is. This is step zero, and it is worth ten minutes to verify.
Here is the checklist we run on every site.
1. Are the AI bots allowed in robots.txt?
Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for blocks on GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended (Google's AI training and Overviews). A blanket "Disallow: /" under one of these names quietly removes you from that engine.
2. Do your important pages return 200?
A page that answers with a 404, 500, or an endless redirect chain cannot be indexed. Check the real status code, not just whether the page looks fine in your browser.
3. Is the content in the HTML, or only after JavaScript?
Many crawlers read the raw HTML and do not run heavy JavaScript. If your main content only appears after the app boots, view the page source (not the inspector) and confirm the words are actually there.
4. Is there an llms.txt?
llms.txt is a simple, plain-text map that points models at your key pages. It is new and optional, but cheap to add and increasingly respected. Treat it like a sitemap written for language models.
5. Is your structured data valid?
JSON-LD for Organization, Product, and FAQ tells engines what your content means instead of making them guess. One broken block can drop the whole thing, so validate it.
6. Is there a real sitemap?
A current XML sitemap helps crawlers find everything, especially deeper pages that are not linked from the homepage. Make sure it lists live URLs and is referenced in robots.txt.
7. Does the page load fast enough?
Slow pages get crawled less and abandoned more. You do not need a perfect score, but a page that takes eight seconds to respond is a page that gets skipped.
Want this scored automatically? TrustSEO's free instant audit checks all seven, gives you a 0-100 readiness score, and hands you a plain-English fix for every miss. No signup needed.
Run the list top to bottom. Most sites pass five or six points and fail one quietly, and that one is usually the reason they were never getting cited.