SEO and AI search checklist for a small business website

Explain the service, intended customer, area served, price or estimate conditions, and enquiry route in ordinary page text. Do not leave critical facts only inside an image or a video. For each service, answer the questions that determine whether a person should contact you: suitability, scope, process and next step.

Use a specific example without presenting it as a real result. “A fictional repair company could list the towns it visits” explains a structure; “we tripled bookings” requires evidence. Label concept sites clearly. Show genuine project details when you have permission, and link to the evidence behind technical claims.

• Important pages have a working public URL and useful HTML text.
• Related pages link to each other using words that describe the destination.
• Each page has an accurate title, summary and canonical address.
• The sitemap includes the pages intended for search; private drafts and fictional concept demos remain excluded from indexing.
• Language links point to the corresponding translated page, with matching language annotations.
• Structured data describes visible, current information; it does not invent ratings, customers or results.

GEO is commonly used to describe preparing content for discovery in generative AI answers. Google says its AI search features do not require special AI files or additional schema. OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot separately from its training crawler. Review the search crawler’s access deliberately; changing training permissions is a separate decision.

A clear answer, supporting sources and crawl access make a page easier to evaluate. They do not guarantee that Google, ChatGPT or Claude will cite it. An llms.txt file can provide an extra reading map, but its presence is not proof of AI visibility. A crawler request is also not the same as a person clicking through from an AI answer.

Write a fixed set of questions a buyer would ask without your business name, such as “Who builds websites for small restaurants with a monthly plan?”. Ask the same questions in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, and note the date, the model or mode shown, the language, whether the answer searched the web and which sources it displayed. Use a new or temporary chat so earlier conversations do not steer the answer.

Count these separately: your business named in the answer; your site shown as a source; your business recommended; your business recommended first; and enquiries that actually arrive from these services in your analytics. A source link only shows where the answer points, so open it and check whether that page supports what the answer says.

Record an answer that failed, was refused or did not search as “not completed”, not as “not mentioned”. Repeat the same questions on a schedule and compare like with like. Visits from AI crawlers are not visits from people, and one answer is not a ranking.

List the questions you answer before a sale: what to prepare, what a quote includes, how long an update takes, and which languages are supported. Give each useful question a complete answer, then connect it to the right service page. Publish a separate page when it adds something substantial, rather than changing a city name in the same paragraph dozens of times.

No. You can improve the clarity, evidence and accessibility of your pages, but an AI service decides which sources to use for each answer.