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Website AEO/SEO Checklist

Use this checklist to audit whether search engines and AI answer systems can find, understand, and cite your public content.

For a live walkthrough with examples, see the How to Audit your Website for AEO/SEO Maven lightning lesson.

Crawl access

  • robots.txt allows major crawlers on public paths and blocks private areas (/dashboard/, /portal/, /api/) per bot
  • XML sitemap lists every indexable URL with honest lastmod dates
  • Each page has a canonical URL (prefer www consistency)
  • No accidental noindex on pages you want discovered

Machine-readable structure

  • JSON-LD on every page type: Organization, WebSite, Course, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList as appropriate
  • Course pages include Course schema with provider and session details
  • FAQ sections emit FAQPage schema with self-contained answers
  • Articles credit a Person author, not only the organization

Cite-ability for answer engines

  • Clear H1 and lead paragraph that define the topic in quotable sentences
  • FAQ answers written as standalone definitions AI can excerpt
  • Stable heading hierarchy (H1 → H2) without keyword stuffing
  • Author attribution and about page linked for E-E-A-T

AI discovery files

  • llms.txt at site root summarizes offerings, courses, and key pages
  • llms.txt generated from catalog — not a stale static copy
  • Internal links from indexed hubs to new or deep pages

Go deeper

This checklist covers the essentials. The Maven course adds live audit examples, Q&A, and prioritization for your site.

Register for the AEO/SEO lightning lesson →

Frequently Asked Questions

What is AEO (answer-engine optimization)?

AEO is the practice of structuring web content so AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — can find, understand, and cite your pages. It extends SEO with schema, FAQs, and machine-readable site summaries.

Where should llms.txt live?

Publish llms.txt at your site root (for example, https://www.example.com/llms.txt). It should summarize your business, key pages, and offerings in plain text for AI crawlers.

Do I need separate rules for AI crawlers in robots.txt?

Yes. Rules under User-agent: * do not apply to GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and similar bots. Give each AI crawler its own block with Allow for public paths and Disallow for private paths.