The 15-Point Technical SEO Checklist for AI Visibility & RAG Readiness

Introduction: The Unseen Foundation of AI Visibility

As generative AI reshapes the search landscape, a new discipline is emerging: AI Search Optimization (AISO). AISO is the practice of making your brand and its content understood, trusted, and recommended by AI models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. But before you can optimize your content or messaging, you must ensure AI can access and comprehend your website on a technical level. This is where the unseen foundation of technical SEO becomes critical.

At the heart of modern AI search is a process called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In simple terms, RAG allows an AI model to fetch information from external sources—like your website—to ground its answers in factual, up-to-date data [1]. This prevents models from relying solely on their static training data. However, the core principle remains: AI models cannot retrieve what they cannot efficiently crawl, parse, and understand. A technically flawed website is invisible to RAG systems.

This article provides a 15-point technical SEO checklist designed specifically for AISO and RAG readiness. These are not just best practices; they are the mandatory requirements for earning a place in AI-generated answers. A healthy technical foundation is the first pillar of a successful AISO strategy, as detailed in the Searchify AISO Action Center Framework, and this checklist is your guide to building it.

Part 1: Crawlability and Accessibility – The Gateway for AI

1. Optimize Your robots.txt File

Your robots.txt file is the first point of contact for any web crawler. It provides directives on which parts of your site can or cannot be accessed. For AI, you must ensure you are not inadvertently blocking the crawlers that feed their knowledge bases.

Why it matters for AI: A misconfigured robots.txt is a closed door. It directly prevents AI models from accessing your content, making inclusion in their knowledge base and subsequent answers impossible. You must explicitly allow crawlers like Google-Extended (for Google's generative models) and ChatGPT-User (for OpenAI's models) to access your valuable content.

Here is an example of a robots.txt file that allows key AI crawlers while disallowing certain directories:

User-agent: * Disallow: /admin/ Disallow: /cart/ User-agent: Google-Extended Disallow: User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: Sitemap: https://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

2. Generate and Maintain a Clean XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a roadmap of your website, telling crawlers which pages you consider important and how recently they were updated. A “clean” sitemap is one that is free of errors, non-canonical URLs, redirects, and pages that return a non-200 status code.

Why it matters for AI: A clean sitemap helps AI crawlers efficiently discover your most important pages and understand when content has been updated. The <lastmod> tag is a crucial signal of freshness, which increases the likelihood that your content will be chosen for time-sensitive queries. This is a key factor for citation-worthiness in a competitive information landscape.

3. Fix Crawl Errors (4xx & 5xx)

Crawl errors, such as 404 (Not Found) or 503 (Service Unavailable), signal a poorly maintained and unreliable website. Regularly use tools like Google Search Console to monitor and fix these errors.

Why it matters for AI: Crawl errors waste an AI's limited crawl budget and erode trust. AI models are designed to prioritize reliable sources. If a crawler encounters numerous dead ends or server issues on your site, it will perceive your domain as less authoritative and will be less likely to retrieve or cite your content. As seen in Searchify's analysis of Patagonia's site issues, technical errors can directly impact AI visibility and allow competitors to gain an advantage.

Part 2: Indexability and Site Structure – Helping AI Make Sense of Your Content

4. Implement a Logical Site Architecture

A well-organized website uses a clear, hierarchical structure that is easy for both users and crawlers to navigate. Models like pillar pages and topic clusters, connected through a logical internal linking strategy, help establish relationships between different pieces of content.

Why it matters for AI: A logical structure helps AI models understand the relationships between your pages, establishing your topical authority on a given subject. When an AI can see how your content on a broad topic (the pillar) connects to more specific sub-topics (the clusters), it is more likely to synthesize a comprehensive answer using multiple pieces of your content, reinforcing your brand's expertise.

5. Use Canonical Tags to Consolidate Signals

Duplicate content can arise from various technical reasons, such as tracking parameters in URLs or having separate print-friendly pages. The rel="canonical" tag tells search engines which version of a URL is the master copy that should be indexed.

Why it matters for AI: AI models need to identify a single source of truth. When multiple versions of the same page exist, it dilutes authority signals and can confuse the AI about which page to retrieve. Canonicalization prevents this confusion and ensures that all relevance and authority signals are consolidated to your preferred URL, strengthening its potential to be cited.

6. Ensure Clean, Semantic HTML

Semantic HTML uses tags for their intended purpose, creating a meaningful structure. This means using a single <h1> for the main title, followed by <h2> and <h3> tags for subheadings in a logical order. It also means using <p> for paragraphs and <ul> or <ol> for lists.

Why it matters for AI: AI models do not “read” pages like humans; they parse the underlying HTML to understand the content's structure and hierarchy. As detailed in Searchify's guide on optimizing for RAG, clean, semantic HTML helps create self-contained and easily extractable 'chunks' of information. These chunks are ideal for retrieval systems, as they can be pulled and synthesized into a coherent answer.

Part 3: Performance and Security – Building a Trustworthy Experience

7. Optimize for Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS)

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics from Google that measure a user's experience with a webpage's loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. The three primary metrics are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). According to Google's own documentation, these are important signals for page experience.

Why it matters for AI: While not a direct content factor, site performance is a strong proxy for quality and authority. AI systems, much like traditional search engines, are designed to prioritize sources that provide a good user experience. A slow, clunky website is a negative quality signal that can reduce the perceived trustworthiness of your content.

8. Implement HTTPS Everywhere

Securing your entire website with SSL/TLS encryption (HTTPS) is no longer optional. It protects the integrity and confidentiality of data between a user's computer and your site.

Why it matters for AI: Security is a non-negotiable trust signal. AI models are heavily biased against insecure (HTTP) sites, as they represent a risk to users. Failing to implement HTTPS across your entire domain makes it highly unlikely that your content will be considered a reputable source worthy of citation in an AI-generated answer.

Part 4: Structured Data – Speaking the Language of AI

9. Deploy 'Organization' Schema

Organization schema is a block of code that explicitly defines your brand as an entity. It allows you to provide key information like your official name, logo, website URL, and social media profiles in a machine-readable format.

Why it matters for AI: This markup explicitly tells AI models who you are, what you do, and where you exist online. It helps the AI connect your content back to your brand entity, building authority and ensuring your brand name isn't confused with other entities. This is a foundational step in managing how AI perceives your brand.

Here is a basic JSON-LD code snippet for Organization schema:

{ "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Organization", "name": "Your Company Name", "url": "https://www.yourwebsite.com", "logo": "https://www.yourwebsite.com/logo.png", "sameAs": [ "https://www.facebook.com/yourprofile", "https://www.twitter.com/yourprofile", "https://www.linkedin.com/company/yourcompany" ] }

10. Use 'Article' Schema for Blog Posts

For blog posts, news, or other editorial content, Article schema provides critical context. It allows you to mark up properties like the headline, author, publication date, and last modified date.

Why it matters for AI: Article schema provides essential metadata that helps AI models verify a content piece's freshness, authorship, and topic. As noted by Google Search Central, this data helps search engines understand your content. For AI, this structured information makes your content more citation-worthy because its key attributes are unambiguous and easily verifiable.

Here is an example of Article schema:

{ "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "headline": "Your Article Title", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Author Name" }, "datePublished": "2024-10-28", "dateModified": "2024-10-28" }

11. Implement 'FAQPage' Schema (Q&A Format)

If you have a page with a list of questions and answers, FAQPage schema is the perfect way to mark it up. This schema nests Question and Answer types within it.

Why it matters for AI: This schema directly formats your content in a way that AI models can use to provide direct answers to user queries. It makes your content highly 'retrievable' for specific questions, increasing the chance that your exact wording will be used and cited in an AI response.

Q: How do I structure FAQ schema?

A: You create a main FAQPage entity that contains an array of Question entities, each with an acceptedAnswer property.

Here is a JSON-LD snippet for an FAQ section:

{ "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": [{ "@type": "Question", "name": "What is AI Search Optimization (AISO)?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "AISO is the practice of making your brand and its content understood, trusted, and recommended by AI models like ChatGPT and Google AI Overview." } },{ "@type": "Question", "name": "Why is technical SEO important for AISO?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "A solid technical foundation ensures that AI crawlers can efficiently access, parse, and understand your website's content, which is a prerequisite for being included in AI-generated answers through processes like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)." } }] }

12. Use 'Person' Schema for Authors

To build credibility, connect your content to real experts. Person schema can be used on author bio pages or embedded within Article schema to mark up author details, including their name, job title, and links to their social profiles or other publications.

Why it matters for AI: This directly builds E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) signals into your website's code. It helps AI models verify the credibility of the content's source by connecting it to a known or discoverable expert entity. For example, this schema can reinforce the expertise of individuals like Searchify's co-founders, Noah Moscovici and Luke Newquist, tying their authority directly to the content they produce.

Part 5: Authority and Freshness – Proving Your Reliability Over Time

13. Fix Broken Internal and External Links

Regularly audit your site for broken links—both internal links to your own pages and external links to other websites. Linking to a resource that no longer exists creates a poor user experience and signals a lack of maintenance.

Why it matters for AI: Outbound links are part of how an AI verifies claims and understands the context of your information. Linking to broken or low-quality pages undermines your content's credibility. If your site appears to be an unreliable hub of information, it is less likely to be trusted or cited by an AI model.

14. Implement 'last-modified' and 'datePublished' Signals

Clearly signal when your content was created and, more importantly, when it was last updated. This should be done with visible on-page dates as well as technical signals like the datePublished and dateModified properties in Article schema and last-modified HTTP headers.

Why it matters for AI: AI models are designed to provide the most current information available. Clearly signaling content freshness is a critical factor for inclusion in answers, especially on timely topics. Without these signals, your content may be perceived as outdated and passed over in favor of a competitor's more recently updated page.

15. Ensure a Flawless Mobile-Friendly Experience

With Google's move to mobile-first indexing, the mobile version of your website is the primary version that gets indexed and ranked. Your site must be fully responsive, fast, and easy to navigate on a mobile device.

Why it matters for AI: AI crawlers, including Google's crawlers, primarily experience your site as a mobile user. A poor mobile experience—such as text that is too small, clickable elements that are too close together, or slow loading times—is a major negative quality signal that can hinder crawling, indexing, and ultimately, your visibility in AI answers.

From Checklist to Action with Searchify

This 15-point checklist forms the basis of the 'Technical Site Health' pillar within Searchify's AISO Action Center. While manually checking these items is a crucial first step, maintaining a technically sound website is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring.

The Searchify platform automates the monitoring of these technical elements and many more, helping teams prioritize fixes based on their direct impact on AI visibility. Our analysis surfaces the technical issues that are holding your brand back and, just as importantly, identifies the weaknesses of your competitors.

By integrating this data, Searchify turns technical SEO from a simple checklist into a competitive advantage. You can see not only what to fix but also why it matters in the context of your AI search competitor landscape.

To see how your own site stacks up, get a free AI Visibility One-Pager from Searchify. It includes an initial technical assessment to help you start your AISO journey.

Conclusion: Technical SEO is the Price of Admission for AI Search

In the new era of generative AI, you cannot have a successful AISO strategy without a rock-solid technical foundation. If AI models cannot find, crawl, and understand your content, your brand will be absent from the conversations that matter most to your customers.

By systematically addressing the key areas of this checklist—Crawlability, Structure, Performance, Schema, and Authority—you are not just ticking boxes. You are laying the groundwork for your content to be discovered, trusted, and cited by AI. Technical SEO is no longer just about ranking in a list of blue links; it's about earning a place in the AI's synthesized answer, and that requires a new level of technical diligence.