The 12-Point AI Citation Audit Checklist

Every engagement starts with an audit, not a rewrite. Here's a condensed version of the checklist behind Phase 1 of our methodology — the questions we answer before touching a single page.

Crawler & access

1. Are AI crawlers (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and equivalents) explicitly allowed in robots.txt?
2. Does the site render meaningful content without JavaScript, or does a non-rendering crawler see an empty shell?
3. Is there a clean, current sitemap that actually reflects what's live?

Structure & schema

4. Does Organization schema exist, and does it match the visible brand name exactly?
5. Are products/services marked up with schema.org types, or only described in prose?
6. Do headings follow a real hierarchy, or is visual styling doing the job semantic tags should be doing?

Content

7. Does the page state its conclusion in the first two sentences, or build up to it?
8. Are claims backed by a specific, citable detail — a number, a named method — rather than a vague superlative?
9. Is the same fact stated consistently across every page that mentions it?

Authority & trust

10. Is authorship attributed, with a real bio or credential behind it?
11. Do sameAs links connect to verified external profiles?
12. Are dates current, and does old content get updated rather than left to quietly go stale?

A page that fails half this list isn't a lost cause — it's a prioritized list of exactly what to fix first.