AI visibility checklist: 56 checks across 7 areas

Why a checklist rather than general advice

Plenty is written about AI visibility, and very little of it is concrete. „Write quality content“, „be an authority in your niche“ — those are sentences that don’t change a single line on your site.

The concrete question sounds different: does your page give the answer in two sentences at the top, or do you only reach the answer in the seventh paragraph? Do your company details exist in a form a machine can read? Does anyone outside your own site mention you by name?

Those are things you can answer. There are 56 of them, split into seven areas. Not one is theoretical.

This is the shortest of our checklists, for a reason. The field is new, so we don’t pad the list to three hundred items to make it look serious. These 56 are what is known with reasonable confidence to help.

What one item looks like

Every item carries five parts:

• The check itself — one clear sentence. For instance: every page answering a question opens with a two-to-three sentence answer.
• Why it matters — what happens when it isn’t so. This states the concrete consequence.
• How to fix it — steps, not principles. What gets written, where it’s added, what it looks like when finished.
• Impact rating (1–3) — how much this item changes your chances of being cited.
• Estimated cost of the fix (1–3) — a one is rewriting one paragraph, a three is work that takes weeks.

Each also comes with a list of recommended tools marked free or paid.

You score with four buttons: Good, Could be better, Bad, Not applicable. The last is excluded from the score — if you have no physical location, items about local data don’t drag your result down.

The repair plan

Everything scored „Bad“ or „Could be better“ enters the repair plan, sorted by the formula (impact + cheapness) × urgency.

With AI visibility that formula almost always pushes content to the top, not technicals. Rewriting an introduction so it answers the question immediately costs half an hour and returns more than any change in the code. Structured data comes right after.

The plan exports to PDF and CSV.

What the tool scores instead of you

The automatic check covers around 150 checks and fills in part of the scores by itself — some of them belong to this checklist.

It takes a sample of pages by type: up to eight products, four categories, two text pages, the basket and the homepage, and takes two to five minutes. From them it reads what can be read from the code: whether structured data exists, how the headings are set, whether a page has a summary at the top, whether the content is available without running scripts.

Manual scores are never touched. Everything the tool fills in is marked as automatic, and when you check it and agree, you click „accept as manual“ and the score becomes yours.

What the tool can’t do: judge whether you genuinely know the subject you’re writing about, and whether anybody outside your site mentions you. That stays with you.

A real example

An accountancy firm, a 40-page site, ranking well on Google for a dozen phrases. The owner tried asking an AI „who does bookkeeping for sole traders in Novi Sad“ — four companies in the answer, none of them his.

The checklist is finished in an hour and a half. Result: 21 good, 18 could be better, 13 bad, 4 not applicable.

The first three items in the repair plan:

1. Texts open with a five-paragraph introduction, the answer only appears in the middle — impact 3, cost 1.
2. There’s no structured data about the company or its services — impact 3, cost 2.
3. Nowhere on the site does it say who writes the texts or what experience they have — impact 3, cost 1.

The first and third were done in one afternoon. The second took two days. The fourth item, off-site mentions, went into the plan for the next three months — it’s the slowest part of the job and the checklist says so openly.

Honestly: nobody knows the exact rules here. AI doesn’t publish how it chooses sources, and it changes from month to month. These 56 items are what is known with reasonable confidence to help — not a promise that they’ll get you cited. Anyone claiming otherwise is making it up.