GEO Checklist 2026: 18 Steps to AI Visibility
This checklist walks you through the key steps so that ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini can read, understand and recommend your website. Tick off what is done; your progress is stored locally in your browser. The items match the criteria the free Vispra audit checks automatically.
Technical basics
Create an llms.txt A curated overview of your most important pages in Markdown format, available at /llms.txt. Quick test: our free llms.txt checker . Add an llms-full.txt (optional) Your full site content in a single document. Low priority, but a plus for citability. Check robots.txt Present and not blocking all bots across the board (User-agent: *, Disallow: /). Otherwise no crawler reaches your content. Allow AI crawlers GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot must not be blocked, otherwise AI systems can neither read nor recommend your content. Structured data (JSON-LD) At least one Organization or LocalBusiness markup with name, address and services on the homepage. FAQ or product schema AI answers prefer citing structured questions and product data. An FAQPage schema is quickly added. XML sitemap Available at /sitemap.xml and referenced in robots.txt. Crawlers find your pages more completely. Canonical tag The homepage points to your own domain via canonical. Prevents duplicate content. Open Graph tags og:title, og:description and og:image. AI assistants and messengers use them for previews and summaries. Great progress! More than half done. Have the rest checked automatically: the
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Content
Title and meta description Both present, with your offer and location. Example: "Musterfirma GmbH | Metal construction Upper Franconia". Meta description length 50 to 160 characters. Too short says nothing, too long gets cut off. Heading structure Exactly one H1, thematically structured H2s. This is how AI systems grasp your content correctly. Enough visible text At least 300 words on the homepage, directly in the HTML, not only via JavaScript. Concrete statements about services, audience and location. Machine-readable company data Legal notice visibly linked, address and phone structured in HTML or JSON-LD. Alt texts on images At least 80 percent of images with a descriptive alt text. Authority
E-E-A-T signals About or team page and contact visibly linked from the homepage. Trust signals for search and AI. Wikidata entry Makes your company tangible as an entity for AI systems. Often easier to achieve than a Wikipedia article. Be present in cited sources Industry directories, comparison portals, editorial lists: AI answers prefer citing such sources. If you are missing there, you get recommended less. Have it checked automatically
Ticking boxes is step one, measuring is step two. The free Vispra check tests every item on this list automatically against your real website and delivers a score from 0 to 100 plus your three biggest gaps as a PDF report.
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