SEO guide
Website SEO checklist: the 5 checks a scan runs
Helps Google and other search engines find, understand, and rank your site.
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Search engines and AI assistants can only cite what they can read. These checks look at the parts of each page that Google uses to decide what the page is about and whether to show it (the tags in the head, the files that guide crawlers, the structured data behind rich results) and at whether the crawlers behind AI answers are allowed in.
All 5 of these checks run on the free scan, with no account.
- 1
Search engine tags
FreeTitles, descriptions, and tags that decide how your site appears in Google.
- 2
Crawler guidance
FreeYour robots.txt and sitemap: the files that tell search engines what to index.
robots.txt: A file that tells search engines which parts of your site they may crawl.
Why it matters: A mistake here can accidentally hide your whole site from Google.
- 3
Structured data (Schema.org)
FreeJSON-LD markup that helps Google show rich results (FAQs, ratings, breadcrumbs) and helps AI search engines understand your page.
- 4
AI site summary (llms.txt)
FreeA short file at your site root that tells AI assistants what the site is and which pages matter.
llms.txt: A short text file at your site root that tells AI assistants what the site is and which pages matter.
Why it matters: It gives ChatGPT, Claude and similar tools a clear summary to cite instead of guessing from scattered pages.
- 5
AI search access
FreeWhether your robots.txt lets the crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI answers read your site.
AI crawler: The bots that read websites for AI assistants and AI search, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.
Why it matters: If robots.txt blocks them, your site cannot be quoted or linked in AI answers.
Common fixes
What the report most often tells you to do when one of these checks fails.
- Give each page a descriptive title of 50–60 characters and a meta description of 120–160 characters.
- Use exactly one H1 per page, with the page’s main heading inside it.
- Add a canonical link with a full absolute URL, so the same page is not indexed twice under different addresses.
- Remove any noindex directive or "Disallow: /" line left over from a staging build, unless you mean to hide the page.
- Publish an XML sitemap, declare it in robots.txt with a Sitemap: line, and list only https URLs on your own host.
- Add JSON-LD structured data with "@context": "https://schema.org" and an @type that fits the page. A single malformed block makes search engines ignore all the structured data on that page.
- Give articles a "datePublished", "dateModified" and "author", and list the organization's real profiles in "sameAs".
- Publish a /llms.txt with a "# " title, a "> " one-line summary, and "## " sections linking your key pages.
- If you want to be cited in AI answers, remove "Disallow: /" for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended in robots.txt.
Run these 5 SEO checks on your site
One scan covers this list and the other categories, and the report says what to fix first.