When a buyer asks an AI assistant for a product recommendation, the assistant can only cite pages it could fetch, understand, and corroborate. Most indie products fail at least one of the three layers: retrievable (can crawlers get the page?), citable (does the page contain quotable answers?), and absorbable (do other sources confirm you exist?). This is the exact checklist CiteScope runs in its full audit. Work through it top to bottom — blockers first.
| Check | What “good” looks like |
|---|---|
| 1. GPTBot allowed in robots.txt | No Disallow rule blocks GPTBot from marketing pages. |
| 2. ClaudeBot allowed | Same for ClaudeBot (Anthropic’s crawler). |
| 3. Google-Extended allowed | Needed for Google’s AI features to use your content. |
| 4. PerplexityBot allowed | Perplexity cites heavily; being blocked removes you from its answers. |
| 5. No accidental noindex | Staging-era noindex tags and X-Robots-Tag headers removed from production. |
| 6. Sitemap exists and is real | sitemap.xml returns 200, lists live pages (not an empty shell), and is referenced in robots.txt. |
| 7. Server-rendered text | Key copy is present in raw HTML; the page is not an empty JavaScript app shell. |
| 8. Canonical tags sane | Each page canonicalizes to itself; no cross-domain canonical surprises. |
| 9. Pages return 200 fast | No redirect chains, no geoblocking of crawler regions, no login walls on marketing pages. |
| 10. Public pricing page | Prices readable in HTML text. Engines cannot cite prices they cannot see. |
| Check | What “good” looks like |
|---|---|
| 11. Title/H1 matches a buyer question | “How much does X cost?” beats a slogan. Mirror how users actually ask. |
| 12. First paragraph answers directly | The answer, with specifics, in the first 2–3 sentences — that is what gets quoted. |
| 13. Hard facts in HTML tables/lists | Prices, limits and specs as text and tables, never only inside images or videos. |
| 14. Product/Offer JSON-LD | Structured data states name, price, currency and availability unambiguously. |
| 15. FAQ section with real questions | Questions buyers ask, answered in one short paragraph each; FAQPage schema attached. |
| 16. Comparison / alternatives page | “X vs Y” and “alternatives to Z” pages capture the highest-intent AI queries. |
| 17. Visible dates and authorship | Published/updated dates and a named author or reviewer on key pages. |
| 18. One idea per page, deep not broad | Pages that fully answer one question outrank thin pages that mention twenty. |
| 19. Numbers with sources | Claims carry figures and, where possible, a source the engine can cross-check. |
| 20. Consistent entity facts | Product name, category and pricing identical everywhere they appear. |
| Check | What “good” looks like |
|---|---|
| 21. Third-party mentions exist | Directories, reviews or forum threads name your product independently. |
| 22. Directory listings claimed | Relevant catalogs list you with the same facts as your site. |
| 23. Community presence | Genuine participation where buyers ask for recommendations (not drive-by spam). |
| 24. Brand + category co-occurrence | Your name appears next to your category keywords on pages other than your own. |
| 25. Legal/trust pages public | Seller disclosure, terms and contact reachable in one click — a quiet trust signal. |
| 26. Stable URLs | No churn: cited URLs keep working; redirects are one hop. |
| 27. Multilingual facts aligned | If you serve multiple languages, facts and prices agree across versions. |
| 28. Spot-check your category prompts | Ask the top engines your 10 money questions monthly; log who gets cited and why. |
| 29. Freshness cadence | Key pages reviewed and re-dated on a schedule; stale claims corrected. |
| 30. Fix the blockers first | One Layer-1 blocker outweighs ten Layer-3 niceties. Order your work by layer. |
Start with the free 12-question self-check on our homepage — it covers the highest-impact items in two minutes. The full CiteScope audit runs all 30 checks plus live AI-answer spot-checks for your category and returns a prioritized fix list as a polished HTML report within 24 hours, for a one-time $49.
CiteScope does not promise rankings or citations. We remove the structural reasons AI engines skip you — what you ship afterwards is still your product.