AI search visibility checklist for small business

Small businesses often lose AI visibility for predictable technical reasons: AI crawlers blocked at Cloudflare or in robots.txt, weak schema.org markup, and pages that never state the offer in plain language. Work through crawl access first, then structure, then content. Google's generative AI guidance stresses helpful non-commodity content and standard SEO — llms.txt is optional for Google but useful for broader AI readiness. No checklist item guarantees citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or AI Overviews.

Use this checklist as an ordered path, not a scorecard. Skipping crawl fixes while polishing schema rarely helps. After each change, verify the production domain, not a staging URL, and avoid promising citations — platforms choose sources independently.