White hat SEO
White hat SEO follows search engine and AI platform guidelines: useful content, honest markup, open crawl access and links people choose to give.
Blog · October 13, 2026
An AI search optimization checklist for service businesses
Twelve checks you can run in an afternoon to see whether AI assistants can read and describe your business correctly.
Use this checklist before you spend anything on AI search. Most items are free to fix.
- robots.txt doesn't block the AI crawlers you want (for example GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot).
- Your firewall or bot protection isn't silently challenging those crawlers.
- The homepage says what you do and where in the first two sentences.
- Each service has its own page with a descriptive title.
- Prices or price ranges are written in text, if you publish them.
- Organization or LocalBusiness schema matches what's visible.
- FAQ answers are on the page, not only in schema.
- Your business name is spelled the same way on your site and profiles.
- Key pages load without requiring JavaScript to show text.
- Comparison and 'best for' questions have honest answers somewhere on your site.
- Contact details are in plain text.
- You can see AI referral traffic as its own channel in analytics.
Ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity to describe your business. Wherever the answer is wrong or vague, trace it back to a page you can fix.
Want this done for you? Start with our free AI discoverability audit. Campaigns are delivered through neetbros for business.