The 2026 SEO checklist for the AI era

1. Technical foundations (the price of admission)

• HTTPS everywhere, HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 enabled.
• Core Web Vitals: LCP < 2.5s, INP < 200ms, CLS < 0.1 on the 75th percentile of real traffic.
• A valid XML sitemap, submitted in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• A robots.txt that allows the major search and AI crawlers and blocks only what you truly need to block.
• Canonical tags on every indexable page; no accidental duplicates.
• Mobile-first responsive layout; no horizontal scroll on 360 px viewports.

2. On-page (write for humans, format for machines)

• One H1 per page, matching the primary search intent.
• H2 / H3 hierarchy that mirrors the table of contents a reader would expect.
• Lead with a TL;DR or summary list — this is the passage LLM retrievers most often quote.
• Use lists, tables and code blocks for facts and steps; prose for context.
• Internal links with descriptive anchor text, not "click here".
• Image alt text that describes the image, not the keyword.

3. Structured data

• Organization and WebSite schema on the home page.
• Article (or BlogPosting) + BreadcrumbList on every editorial post.
• FAQPage on any page with a Q&A block.
• Product, Offer, AggregateRating on commerce pages.
• HowTo on step-by-step guides (but only when the steps are real, not marketing copy).

4. GEO / AEO additions

• Publish an llms.txt at the site root with your canonical map of pages.
• Allow GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended in robots.txt — unless you have a legal reason not to.
• Add an updated date to every editorial page, visible to humans and inside Article schema.
• Maintain an entity page (an About page that clearly states who you are, what you do, where you operate, and who your founders are). Models lean heavily on it.
• Run a recurring prompt audit: take your 50 most important buyer questions and check, monthly, which AI engines cite you.

5. Off-page

• Earn editorial mentions in trade publications your buyers read. LLMs trust them.
• Keep your Wikipedia entity (if eligible) accurate and well-sourced.
• Claim and complete profiles in the major directories for your category.
• Be consistent: same brand name, same description, same logo, everywhere.

6. Measurement

• Rankings: Google + Bing, weekly, for your priority queries.
• Citations: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, weekly.
• Share of voice vs. your top three competitors.
• Crawl health and Core Web Vitals from real-user monitoring.
• Brand sentiment in AI answers — is the model describing you accurately?