AI Search Optimization Checklist: 20 Ways to Be Citable

This AI search optimization checklist covers how to optimize for AI search engines in 20 tactics, ordered from access to measurement, so ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews can read and cite your site. Work through it in order, since each stage depends on the one before it.

None of these guarantees a citation. The engines pick sources differently from each other; we showed that in our 500-prompt study, and the same engine changes its picks from one run to the next, so the goal is to remove the reasons a page gets skipped. Some teams call this work AEO, and others call it GEO. The tactics overlap heavily, so one list covers both.

Checklist at a glance

Fix the top row first, since nothing below it matters if engines can't read the page.

Access: can AI engines reach your page?

1. Let AI crawlers in

Check your robots.txt first. Each company runs more than one crawler, and the ones that matter for citations are the search and user-fetch bots, not just the training bots. For OpenAI, that’s OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, alongside GPTBot. For Anthropic, it’s Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, alongside ClaudeBot. Perplexity runs PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User. Yogoo AI has a five-minute test to check whether ChatGPT can read your website.

2. Put your main content in the HTML

Many AI crawlers read raw HTML and don't run JavaScript. If your headings and body text only show up after client-side rendering, those crawlers see an empty shell. View the page source, and if your main text isn't in it, move to server-side rendering or static output.

3. Confirm Google has indexed the page

Google AI Overviews are built on Google Search, so start by confirming the page is indexed. Submit an XML sitemap, then check Search Console for excluded pages and stray noindex tags. Other engines run their own retrieval, but indexing is still the cheapest place to start.

4. Add an llms.txt file

llms.txt is a proposed file that points AI systems to your key pages. It's a proposal, not an established standard. Treat it as housekeeping and not a ranking lever, and let the llms.txt generator draft one from your live site so you don't write it by hand.

For the deeper crawlability check, the GEO site audit skill runs it against your own site and returns a list of fixes.

Page structure: can an engine lift a clean passage?

5. Answer the question in the first sentence

Put the answer in the first sentence of the page and again under every major heading. Engines lift passages, not pages, and a passage that opens with its answer needs no editing to be quoted. Cut the scene-setting intro. Try it on your own draft: if someone copied only your first two sentences, would they walk away with an answer?

6. Write headings the way people phrase prompts

"How long does onboarding take?" beats "Our Onboarding Approach." The wording comes easily from sales calls and Search Console queries, and it matches what people type into an AI engine.

7. Make every section stand on its own

Each section should make sense alone. Name the subject in full instead of writing "this" or "it," and drop phrases like "as mentioned above." An engine that lifts one paragraph shouldn't get one that leans on the three before it.

8. Use lists and tables for facts and comparisons

Put steps in numbered lists and comparisons in tables. Label every column, and put units and dates inside the cells so a lifted row still makes sense by itself. An engine can lift one row or one step without the text around it, and people scan these blocks faster too.

9. Add structured data that matches the page

Article schema on posts and Organization schema on your homepage tell engines what a page is and who published it. Yogoo AI's study didn't test whether markup changes citation rates. Treat it as labeling and not as a booster, and keep it matched to the visible copy.

Once a draft is ready, the citation-ready content check runs it against 8 citation heuristics and rewrites only the parts that don’t meet them.

Content: can an engine trust what you wrote?

10. Say what your company does in one sentence

Write one sentence that says what you do and who it's for. Put it near the top of your homepage and About page. Engines build a picture of a brand from what they read, and a vague or shifting description makes that picture blurry.

11. Back claims with specifics

Swap "many companies see results" for a figure and its source. Say who ran the study and when. An engine can check a specific claim, so it's more useful to quote. If you can't source a number, leave it out.

12. Show who wrote it

Every article needs a named author with a short bio, plus a publish date. Google's quality guidelines look for first-hand experience and expertise, and readers pick up the same cues when they decide whether to trust a page.

13. Publish original data or first-hand results

Original numbers give an engine something it can't pull from a competitor's page. Yogoo AI's 500-prompt study ran each prompt at least three times on each of five engines, which produced 8,695 answers to analyze. A smaller test counts too, as long as you state the method and its limits.

14. Keep important pages current

Update pages that answer high-value questions, and change the visible date only when the content changes. Stale numbers make a page less useful. Yogoo AI's free GEO skills each carry a last-verified date, so readers can see how current one is.

You can see how a published method is written up in the full study write-up.

Off-site presence: does anyone else vouch for you?

Engines read more than your site. Across all 500 prompts in the study, branded and unbranded, YouTube appeared in 22.9% of answers (1,990 of 8,695) and Reddit in 21.5% (1,868 of 8,695), the two highest of any domain, and no single domain landed in every engine's top 10.

15. Publish on YouTube

Google AI Overviews cited YouTube in 53.6% of answers (930 of 1,735). Engines read the text around a video, not the video itself, so upload corrected captions and write a title that names the topic.

16. Take part in Reddit threads

Reddit was the second most cited domain in the study, appearing in 1,868 of 8,695 answers. Answer questions in threads about your category before you mention your brand. Say so if you're affiliated, since new accounts that lead with promotion risk removal or a shadowban.

17. Get included in roundups and comparison pages

Third-party lists shape what engines say about a category. ChatGPT (GPT-4o-mini + web search (API)) cited TechRadar more often than any other domain in the study. Claude's top sources were mostly niche vendor and blog sites, and Gemini mixed those with larger publishers. That's one category's result, so check which sources the engines cite for yours. Then pitch the publications that already run roundups in your space.

18. Complete your LinkedIn company page

LinkedIn came up less often than Reddit or YouTube, but it still appeared in 12.3% of all answers (1,073 of 8,695). Fill out your company page, and match its description to the sentence you wrote for your own site.

If Perplexity is where you want to show up first, read how Perplexity citations work.

Measurement: Is any of it working?

19. Test real prompts on each engine separately

Run the questions your buyers ask on all five engines, and write down which sources each one cites. The engines behave differently. Gemini averaged 10.4 sources per answer and Google AI Overviews 7.6, while Claude averaged 3.3.

Perplexity cited a source in all 1,738 of its answers and averaged 17.8 sources each. ChatGPT (GPT-4o-mini + web search (API)) averaged 2.3, so what one engine cites doesn't tell you what another cites.

Source: Yogoo AI 500-prompt study, 8,695 answers, collected August 10 to 11, 2026. Every prompt ran at least three times on each engine. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini ran through their APIs with web search on, so they approximate the consumer apps and don't match them exactly.

20. Track citations over time

AI answers change between runs, so one test is a snapshot. Re-run the same prompts on a schedule, and track how many answers your brand appears in and which sources show up instead, because the gaps only show across repeated runs.

For how Yogoo AI counts answers in your market, engine by engine, read how Yogoo AI measures AI visibility.

Where should you start?

Before you change anything, get a baseline: run your key prompts and count how many of the answers name or link your business, like 7 of 23. Yogoo AI reports that share as your Yogoo Score, always shown with its counts, and everyone in a measured market sees theirs for free. If Yogoo AI doesn’t measure your market yet, the page says “We don’t measure your market yet,” and you can ask Yogoo AI to cover it. Each market is built on purpose, with its own fixed set of questions, so a missing market means nobody has measured it yet. It says nothing about your business.