Picture it: your website sits on page one of Google for your main service. The reviews are good. The contact form converts. But suddenly your customers aren’t going straight to Google. They’re asking AI, and ChatGPT has never heard of you.
Not because your content is weak. Because your firewall is turning search bots away at the door with a 403 error.
Bot protection tools like Cloudflare are brilliant at keeping out scrapers and spam. However, left on the wrong settings, though, they will also block the bots that would happily recommend you to a customer.
So what is AEO?
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. SEO gets you onto Google’s results page. AEO gets you into the answer when someone asks Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Perplexity who they should call.
It doesn’t replace SEO, it forms part of the strategy. If your site is slow, badly linked or full of duplicate pages, AI tools will struggle with it for the same reasons Google does.
Our SEO team has been busy turning AEO into something practical that can be implemented and measured. The team are implementing these things for our clients every day, but it occurred to us that there is no definitive list, and people do not know where to start. So we made a checklist; seven stages to make sure your website is doing the basics well.
How AEO-ready is your website?
AI search is moving fast enough that we fully expect to rewrite parts of it before Christmas. But here’s the short version of our checklist. How many can you tick?
1. AI bot access and baseline
AI search bots from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google and Bing are allowed into your site
Your firewall or bot protection isn’t quietly blocking them
You’ve decided whether AI companies can train on your content
You’re tracking visits and enquiries from AI assistants
2. Questions and prompts
You know the three to five topics you want to be known for
You have a list of the real questions your customers ask
You’ve tested how ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and Claude answer them
3. Technical health
Every key page is indexed by Google and Bing
There are no broken links or duplicate pages
Your sitemap is up to date
Your pages load quickly on mobile
4. Structure and schema
Your schema tells AI tools who you are and links to your official profiles
Your services, FAQs and articles have schema too
Each core topic has its own hub page
5. Page-level checks
Key pages open with a direct answer
Headings are phrased as the questions customers ask
Prices, services and locations are stated plainly and match across the site
6. Off-site signals
Your Google Business Profile and Bing Places listings are complete
Your name, address and phone number match everywhere
Your LinkedIn page matches your website
7. Ongoing upkeep
Someone re-tests your AI visibility every month
Anything inaccurate AI says about you gets corrected
Someone checks for new AI bots every quarter
How did you do?
If you ticked the whole list off, thats great, you can start to really optimise for AEO.
If there were a few gaps, you’re not alone. AEO is new enough that most websites weren’t built with it in mind. Plenty of those boxes also need a full site crawl, a handful of logins and a fair bit of know-how to check properly, which is where we come in. We’ll run our full checklist on your site, show you exactly where you stand, tailor a plan to make your site AI ready.
In the meantime, try this. Ask ChatGPT about your business the way a customer would. If the answer is vague, out of date or recommending your competitors, it might be time for a chat.
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