Doing AEO
What should an AEO checklist include?
By the RankNext team · Updated July 2026
The short answer
An AEO checklist should include eight items: verified AI crawler access in robots.txt, valid schema markup, one literal H1 stating the topic, question-phrased H2s, a direct answer under each heading, consistent name, address, and phone everywhere, a steady review cadence, and monthly sampling of AI engines to see what they actually say about you.
Start with crawler access, because nothing else on the list matters if GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot cannot fetch your pages. Plenty of sites block these bots without realizing it, usually from a firewall rule or a robots.txt template someone copied years ago.
The on-page half is boring on purpose: one H1 that literally names what you do and where, H2s phrased as real customer questions, and a plain answer in the first sentence under each one. Add valid schema, matching name, address, and phone across every listing, and a steady flow of reviews with owner replies. Our guide to AEO best practices walks through each item in order.
The item most checklists skip is measurement, and that is the tell. If nobody asks ChatGPT and Perplexity your own money questions every month, you are performing optimization, not doing it. You can run your site against the full list in about a minute and see exactly which items you are missing.
See if AI recommends your business.
Free, about a minute, real near-me answers for your city.