These are the exact 8 checks the AIVisibly scanner runs on your site. Each one is a concrete signal that AI tools use when deciding whether to read and cite your content. Work through them top to bottom — they are ordered by impact.
A valid /llms.txt file gives AI tools a structured Markdown index of your site's most important pages. Without it, crawlers have to infer structure from your HTML navigation — which often means missing your best content.
/llms.txt with an H1 (your site name), a blockquote description, and H2 sections listing key pages as Markdown links. Deploy it at your web root. See the llms.txt checker for the exact format.AI crawlers respect your robots.txt. If you have a catch-all Disallow: / rule or explicit blocks for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot, those tools cannot access your site at all. This is the most common and most damaging blocker.
/robots.txt and check for Disallow: / under User-agent: *, User-agent: GPTBot, User-agent: ClaudeBot, or User-agent: PerplexityBot. Add explicit Allow blocks for each crawler you want to permit. See the full crawler reference.Schema.org markup in JSON-LD format tells AI tools what type of entity your page represents — a business, a product, a FAQ, an article. Pages with structured data are easier for AI tools to understand and cite accurately.
<script type="application/ld+json"> block to your homepage with at minimum an Organization schema (name, url, description) and a WebSite schema. Add FAQPage schema to any page with Q&A content. Add Article or BlogPosting to editorial content.The meta description is often the first text an AI tool reads when deciding whether a page is relevant to a query. A missing or generic description reduces citation accuracy; a specific, honest description increases it.
<meta name="description" content="..."> tag to every important page. Write it as a direct answer to the question the page addresses. Keep it under 160 characters. Avoid keyword stuffing — AI tools favour natural language descriptions.A sitemap helps crawlers find pages they would not discover through internal links. Missing sitemaps mean incomplete coverage; outdated sitemaps mislead crawlers about which pages are current and important.
<lastmod> dates. Place it at /sitemap.xml and reference it in /robots.txt with a Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml line. Update lastmod dates when you publish or update a page.If your pages are accessible via multiple URLs (with/without trailing slash, www vs non-www, https vs http), AI crawlers may index them as separate pages or skip them as duplicates. A canonical tag resolves this unambiguously.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com/page"> to every page's <head>. Ensure it matches the URL in your sitemap and uses your preferred scheme (https) and subdomain (www or non-www).Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) are widely used by AI tools as a fast, machine-readable summary of a page's content. Many AI link previews and citation tools pull from OG data.
<meta property="og:title">, <meta property="og:description">, and <meta property="og:type"> to every page's <head>. Use og:type="website" for homepages, "article" for blog posts. Match the description to your meta description.The HTML <title> tag is one of the highest-weight signals for both search engines and AI tools. Duplicate or vague titles reduce the chance of accurate citation. Each page should have a title that precisely describes its content.
Run the free scanner to find out which of these 8 checks your site is failing right now.
Scan my site →AI SEO (also called GEO — Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of making your website readable and citable by AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. It overlaps with traditional SEO but adds specific signals like llms.txt and AI-friendly robots.txt rules.
robots.txt is the highest-priority check because a Disallow rule blocks all other optimizations. After that, llms.txt and JSON-LD structured data have the biggest impact on how accurately AI tools represent your content.
For most sites, 2–4 hours. robots.txt and llms.txt are 15 minutes each. JSON-LD takes longer but a single Organization + FAQPage schema on your homepage covers the most important ground quickly.