What you'll get
A checklist that helps Google and AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity find, read, and cite your site. The first four steps explain what to check and what to fix. The last step is a prompt you give your AI agent. It runs a checkup first, then makes fixes one at a time, and only after you approve each one.
Most of the work is classic SEO. AI search adds three new things on top: letting AI crawlers in, writing pages that AI wants to quote, and testing yourself to see whether AI mentions you.
Step 1: Make sure AI can read your site
Many sites are missing from AI search results. The cause is usually not the content. The crawlers never got in. Check each item:
- View the page source: Right-click in your browser and choose "View page source." The title and body text should appear there. If the text only shows up after JavaScript runs, a crawler that skips scripts sees an empty page.
- Check the live robots.txt: Open
yourdomain/robots.txtin a browser. Look at the live file, not the copy in your project. Services like Cloudflare can add rules to the top of the file on their own, and some have a single switch that blocks every AI crawler. - Know the two kinds of AI crawlers: Blocking training crawlers does not affect AI search. Blocking the search crawlers removes your site from AI answers.
| Crawler | What it does | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Bingbot | Live search. Fetches your pages when an AI answers a question | Always allow |
| GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended | Collects training data | Your choice. Blocking these does not affect AI search |
- Add three basics: a sitemap that lists only the pages you want indexed, one canonical tag per page (it tells search engines which URL is the official one), and structured data (it says who you are and what you sell). Don't add review stars unless you have real reviews.
- Pick one URL version: with or without www, http or https. Every version should redirect to the same address.
Step 2: Spend ten minutes on Bing Webmaster Tools
Copilot runs on Bing, and ChatGPT's web search often uses it too, so don't focus only on Google. Sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools. Import your site from Google Search Console with one click, submit your sitemap, and turn on IndexNow, which tells Bing about new pages as soon as you publish them. Inside it, a report on AI answers lists the questions where an assistant quoted your pages. Right now, that's the closest thing to free AI citation data.
Step 3: Write the pages buyers read before deciding
The pages most likely to get cited by AI, and to bring in customers, are the ones a buyer opens when they are about to pick a product. Examples: "A vs. B, which should I pick?", "alternatives to X", "the best X for [type of person]", and "how much does X cost?" Keep these points in mind.
- Search first, then write: Google the question and see what kind of pages fill the top 10, such as comparisons, lists, or product pages. Write that same type. When every result is an article and your site sells a product, that question isn't for you.
- Put the answer, with your product's name, in the opening paragraph (roughly 40 to 80 words). Models quote a paragraph at a time, so the opening matters most.
- Keep lists to 5 to 8 options. Very short lists read like sales copy, and very long ones read like a link dump.
- Check prices on the official site and write down the date you checked. For every option, list a real drawback, including your own. Don't put yourself first on your own list.
- Add something the top 10 don't have: your own data, tests, or screenshots, plus a note on how you got them.
Step 4: Test for free whether AI mentions you
Skip the paid monitoring tools for now. Test by hand first.
- Write 15 to 30 questions real customers would ask. Pull them from emails, support logs, or user reviews. Don't make them up from scratch.
- Log out of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Ask each question at least twice. AI answers change every week, so one test tells you very little.
- For each answer, note which brands get named and which URLs get linked. A link to your page and a recommendation to buy are different results, so log them on separate lines.
- Ask new users where they first heard of you when they sign up. Analytics tools often credit the wrong source.
Step 5: Hand the checkup and fixes to your AI agent
If your AI agent has access to the code behind your site, it can both check and fix. A chat-only AI assistant can run the checkup and write drafts, but it can't change your code. Send the text below and replace the bracketed parts with your details:
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A few reasons behind the wording:
- Check first, then change anything: One wrong line in robots.txt, a canonical tag, or a noindex can remove your whole site from search. That's why you approve each step.
- No deleting pages and no made-up numbers: These are the two things that most often go wrong when an AI agent works on SEO.
- No FAQ or HowTo structured data: Google no longer shows rich results for either one on regular sites, so adding them gains nothing.
Ready-made SEO skills and open-source tools, sorted by whether they're worth it
Many SEO skills and tools are written for AI agents, and star counts can't tell you whether the advice is current. Before you pick one, run a small test. Ask it: "Which crawler decides whether ChatGPT search indexes your site?" The right answer, per OpenAI's documentation, is OAI-SearchBot. GPTBot is only for collecting training data. If it answers GPTBot, treat the rest of its advice with suspicion.
Star counts below are from GitHub in November 2026. All of them use the MIT license.
Install these
| Project | Why it's good | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| RomeoSEO/seo-skills (48 skills) | Explains its methods most clearly, and the files don't carry any sales pitch | The project is very new and has few stars |
| AgriciDaniel/claude-seo (about 28,000 stars) | The sharpest on crawling, schema and AI bot rules, with working check scripts behind it. It also gets the crawler question above right | After a long report it points you to a paid membership group. You only need the page, technical and structured data commands |
Install once you have Search Console data
| Project | Why it's good | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| AminForou/mcp-gsc (about 2,200 stars) | Lets your AI agent read your Search Console directly. Free, local, and it can't write anything unless you allow it | A new site has no data yet, so there's nothing to use it on |
| every-app/open-seo (about 27,000 stars) | An open-source take on Semrush and Ahrefs. It reminds you that a search volume is not the same as visits | You still have to buy keyword data separately |
| nowork-studio/notfair-plugin (about 4,100 stars) | Gives detailed checks on single pages even without Search Console data | Your data goes through their own servers. It also treats missing FAQ structured data as a big problem, which is out of date |
Borrow one idea, skip the rest
| Project | Worth borrowing | Skip this |
|---|---|---|
| zubair-trabzada/geo-seo-claude (about 12,000 stars) | Reads your live robots.txt and checks whether Cloudflare has added blocking rules on its own | It says blocking GPTBot keeps you out of ChatGPT search. OpenAI's docs say the opposite. The checklist also includes HowTo, which Google stopped showing long ago. It installs by downloading a script and running it straight away, so have your AI agent have your AI agent go through that script before it runs |
| TheCraigHewitt/seomachine (about 7,600 stars) | Background files for brand voice, product features and writing style | Targets like a 1 to 2% keyword density. It also has a rule that asks the AI to write short stories with people's names in them, even made-up ones. Delete that |
| open-seo-mcp-skills (by Ryze-AI-Adgent) (about 9,100 stars) | A good rule: never make up search volumes | The skills are thin, and your numbers travel through a connector they host |
| i365dev/awesome-seo (about 2,900 stars) | A reading list with no sales pitch. It warns that Cloudflare's Bot Fight Mode can block normal crawlers too, so check your security event log after launch | It's a list, not a tool. Use it for research |
A few of these hand your site a grade from 0 to 100. Nobody has tested that grade against actual rankings or AI mentions, so read the problems it finds and skip the grade.
Ten skills to install first
All ten come from RomeoSEO/seo-skills above. They're ordered by foundations first, then writing pages, then measuring results.
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
| technical-seo-audit | Checks whether search engines can crawl, render and index your pages, and whether they load fast on phones |
| schema-markup | Checks and adds structured data, and removes types Google no longer shows |
| ai-agent-readiness | Makes your site readable and usable for AI crawlers and AI that browses the web. Covers robots.txt and firewall blocks |
| xml-sitemap-check | Checks that your sitemap matches the pages you actually want indexed. It can also generate a clean one |
| seo-change-monitor | Takes snapshots of key pages before and after each launch. It catches noindex, canonical and redirect changes you broke by accident |
| comparison-page-writer | Writes pages for "which is best", "A vs B" and "alternatives to X". Gives the verdict first, and lists the downsides of every option |
| ai-prompt-research | Finds the questions customers really ask AI, and matches each one to the page that should be cited |
| ai-brand-facts | Finds where AI gets your prices and features wrong, then traces the wrong source so you can fix it |
| seo-content-qa | Scores an article before publishing, out of 40, and gives a pass or fail |
| ai-traffic-analytics | Uses free tools to count how many visits, sign-ups and revenue come from AI search |
Leave the rest for later. Around twelve target e-commerce, local listings or moving a site to a new domain, and several only work once Search Console has collected a few months of history. Before you install any of them, have your AI agent show you the files.
Notes
- A new site grows slowly. Adding 1 to 4 pages a week is enough. After a change, wait two or three months before you judge it.
- Stay away from link exchanges, link networks, mass AI-written articles, and "city × service" template pages. Search engines treat all of these as spam.
- Numbers other people give, like "rank 8 to 15 is the best range to improve" or "5 internal links per page," are rules of thumb, not laws.
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