AI Search Optimisation Checklist
A step-by-step checklist to optimise your site and content for AI search engines and large language models.
Cogniva is a Melbourne-based search visibility and AI systems consultancy. We help Victorian businesses get found across both traditional search and AI engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. Because we work across all three rather than specialising in one, our recommendations are engine-agnostic where it counts and engine-specific where it matters — and we're candid that AI citation is probabilistic, so we focus on the controllable inputs and on measuring real results rather than promising guaranteed placement.
If you've landed here, you want actions, not concepts. So this page is deliberately thin on explanation and heavy on doing. Each item says what to do, why it matters in one line, and — the part most checklists skip — which engines it actually affects, because a fair amount of "AI search" advice silently optimises for one platform while implying it helps all of them.
A note before the list: do these roughly in order. The foundation items aren't optional warm-ups — if they're broken, the later items can't work. And one honest caveat up front: this is a checklist, not a guarantee. AI search behaviour shifts, the engines change their sourcing, and being cited is always probabilistic. Treat this as raising your odds, not buying a result. For the strategic question of whether to invest here at all, start with our GEO Melbourne guide.
How to read the engine tags
Each item is tagged with the engines it meaningfully affects:
[All]
helps ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity[Google]
primarily Google AI Overviews[ChatGPT]
primarily ChatGPT[Perplexity]
primarily Perplexity
Where an action is [All], it's a high-priority dollar because it pays off across every engine at once. Single-engine items are worth doing in proportion to how much your audience uses that engine.
Section 1 — Foundations (do these first, they gate everything else)
☐ Confirm your key pages are crawlable and indexable. [All]
If a page can't be reached and indexed, no AI engine can cite it. This is non-negotiable and comes before everything. Check that robots.txt isn't blocking important pages and that your priority pages return clean status codes.
☐ Get indexed on Bing, not just Google. [ChatGPT] [Perplexity]
ChatGPT's browsing and Perplexity both lean on indexes where Bing matters far more than most marketers assume. Submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools and confirm Bingbot isn't blocked. This is the single most overlooked foundational action, because a decade of habit says "Bing doesn't matter." For AI search, it does.
☐ Check your AI crawler access. [All]
The engines use specific crawlers (such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot) to fetch live pages. If your robots.txt or firewall blocks them, you've opted out of citation without realising. Confirm they're allowed on the pages you want surfaced. Tradeoff worth naming: some businesses deliberately block AI crawlers to protect content — that's a legitimate choice, but understand it removes you from those engines' live answers.
☐ Fix Core Web Vitals and mobile rendering. [All]
Technical health feeds the underlying search indexes these engines draw on. This overlaps entirely with good traditional SEO, so it's not extra work if it's already being done.
Section 2 — Content structure (make your pages easy to extract from)
☐ Front-load the answer in every key section. [All]
AI engines extract the cleanest answer they can find quickly and tend not to dig to the bottom of a page. Put the direct answer to a likely question in the opening lines of the relevant section, then elaborate. This is the highest-leverage content change you can make and it costs nothing but discipline.
Section 3 — Authority and corroboration (prove you're real to the wider web)
☐ Build and maintain third-party review profiles. [ChatGPT] [Perplexity]
Active profiles on platforms like Trustpilot, G2, Capterra or Yelp appear to raise citation likelihood, because the engines treat them as evidence a business is real and verifiable. Complete and maintain the ones relevant to your industry.
☐ Ensure consistent name, category and details across the web. [All]
The engines cross-check whether the wider web corroborates what your own site claims. Inconsistent business names, addresses or descriptions weaken that signal. Audit your listings and citations for consistency.
☐ Earn mentions across sources that cover your category. [All]
Being named accurately and repeatedly across third-party sources is what builds the recurring presence engines reuse when answering related queries. This is the slowest item on the list and the most defensible once achieved — it can't be bought quickly, which is exactly why competitors can't copy it overnight.
☐ Get listed in relevant directories and reference sources. [All]
Industry directories, association listings, and where genuinely warranted, reference platforms, all add corroboration. Quality over quantity — irrelevant directory spam does nothing.
Section 4 — Freshness and maintenance (the part that's never "done")
☐ Update high-value pages regularly. [All]
AI engines weight recency more heavily than classic Google ranking did. Pages updated recently tend to be cited more than stale ones, so your most important pages need a genuine refresh cadence — not a date change, but real updates. This is the item businesses most often abandon, which is precisely why sustaining it is an advantage.
☐ Re-test your priority prompts on a schedule. [All]
Citation is unstable month to month. Set a recurring check — ask each engine the questions your customers ask and record whether you appear, how you're described, and who's cited instead. Without this you're flying blind, because there's no rank tracker that captures it.
☐ Watch for and correct how engines describe you. [All]
AI engines sometimes describe a business inaccurately, pulling from outdated or wrong sources. If you're being misdescribed, the fix is usually upstream — correct the source the engine is drawing from, strengthen the accurate sources, and let corroboration shift the picture.
☐ Keep your strongest content current rather than publishing endlessly. [All]
Given the freshness weighting, maintaining and improving your best existing pages often beats publishing a stream of new thin ones. Depth and currency over volume.
The realistic priority order
If you can't do all of it at once — and most businesses can't — here's the honest sequence: get the foundations clean (Section 1), then front-load and structure your highest-value pages (Section 2), then build corroboration (Section 3), then commit to the maintenance loop (Section 4). The [All] items inside each section come first, because they pay off across every engine.
And the uncomfortable truth that makes this whole list manageable: most of it is good SEO and good business hygiene. The genuinely AI-specific additions are the Bing indexing, the AI-crawler access, the answer front-loading, and the prompt-testing loop. If your foundations are already strong, the marginal AI search work is smaller than the hype suggests — which is the same point our GEO vs SEO breakdown makes from the budgeting angle.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
Straight answers before you book anything — and if yours isn’t here, ask us in the consultation.
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