AI SEO checker: what to scan before ChatGPT can cite your site

An AI SEO checker is not a normal SEO checker with a new label. Traditional SEO tools focus on rankings, keywords, backlinks, Core Web Vitals, and search snippets. AI SEO focuses on whether an LLM can find, read, trust, cite, and act on your website.

You still need normal SEO. But if your goal is visibility in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI agents, you need a different scan.

What an AI SEO checker should inspect

Start with six categories.

1. Crawl access

Your site should return a clean status code and avoid accidental blocks:

• homepage returns 200
• canonical redirects are stable
• robots.txt exists
• AI retrieval bots are not blocked by accident
• sitemap exists and points to real pages

This is the lowest layer. If crawlers cannot access your site, nothing else matters.

2. LLM readability

AI systems prefer content that is easy to extract. A checker should inspect the initial HTML, not only the browser-rendered page.

Look for:

• useful text in server-rendered HTML
• a clear H1
• descriptive headings
• clean internal links
• low boilerplate-to-content ratio
• markdown alternatives where possible

If the page needs a full browser session to become meaningful, it may be invisible to many retrieval systems.

3. Structured facts

AI answers are built from facts and entities. Your checker should look for:

• title tag
• meta description
• canonical URL
• Open Graph tags
• JSON-LD
• organization identity
• author and publish dates

This is where LLM SEO overlaps with classic technical SEO. The difference is that AI systems use these signals to disambiguate entities and cite sources, not only to render a search result.

4. Answer readiness

Models cite passages that answer questions. A page with vague positioning copy may rank in Google but fail in AI search.

An AI SEO checker should ask:

• Does the page answer a specific query?
• Is the direct answer near the top?
• Are definitions clear?
• Are comparisons explicit?
• Are claims supported with context?
• Can a sentence stand alone in an AI answer?

This is the content part of the score.

5. llms.txt

llms.txt is a simple file that points LLMs to your best pages. It is not a magic ranking factor, but it is a useful extractability signal.

Good llms.txt files are short and curated. They do not list every URL. They tell a model which pages are most useful.

6. Agent readiness

AI agents need more than content. They look for APIs, tools, auth metadata, and well-known discovery files.

Advanced scans should check:

• MCP server cards
• agent skills manifests
• API catalogs
• OAuth discovery
• protected resource metadata
• markdown content negotiation
• commerce discovery for paid resources

Most sites score low here today. That makes it a strong place to get ahead.

The fastest way to check your own site

Run a scan with NoticeMeAI. The free scan covers the core AI SEO basics: homepage status, robots.txt, sitemap, AI bot policy, head tags, JSON-LD, llms.txt, and markdown availability.

Then fix issues in this order:

1. unblock the right crawlers
2. make content readable in HTML
3. add structured data
4. publish llms.txt
5. create pages that answer specific prompts
6. add agent-readiness endpoints when the content foundation is strong

That order keeps the work simple and prevents teams from polishing the wrong layer.