How to check if ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can find your site: a 7-step GEO checklist

GEO (generative engine optimization) is about getting your site into the answers AI assistants give. Before content or links matter, the basics have to work. Here is the checklist I run on every site:

1. robots.txt: make sure you don't block GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Bingbot by accident.

2. Server-rendered text: open your page with JavaScript disabled. If the main text disappears, many crawlers won't see it either.

3. Indexing in Google and Bing: AI assistants lean on search indexes. ChatGPT and Copilot rely heavily on Bing, Claude uses Brave, and Brave discovers sites largely through Google and Bing. Verify in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

4. Sitemap with lastmod: tell crawlers what changed and when, and ping IndexNow on updates.

5. One clear page per buyer question: comparison, pricing and 'what is X' pages are what assistants quote.

6. Structured data: Organization, Product/Offer, Article and FAQ schema help machines read who you are and what you sell.

7. Real mentions elsewhere: honest reviews, directories and articles that link to you. Assistants trust what others say about you.

AURA GEO automates this: it checks each step, fixes what it can, and verifies the result. But the checklist works by hand too.

Which of these steps has been the hardest for your site? Happy to answer questions here.