The 10-Point AEO Checklist
This AEO checklist has 10 points: real questions, first-sentence answers, short passages, one page per question, question headings, numbers, crawl access, first-hand proof, off-site mentions, and tracking. Points 1 to 5 fix the writing and 6 to 10 fix what sits around it. Work it top to bottom.
Key Points
| Points | What You Fix | Where You Check It |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 5 | The writing: questions, answers, passage length, page count, headings | On the page itself |
| 6 and 8 | The proof: numbers and first-hand evidence | Your orders, tests, and photos |
| 7 | Access: robots.txt, firewall rules, indexing | Search Console and your host |
| 9 and 10 | Mentions and tracking | YouTube, Reddit, Search Console, GA4 |
1. Start With Questions People Ask
Starting with questions people ask means every page on this AEO checklist begins with something a shopper typed, worded the way they typed it. Made-up questions produce pages nobody quotes.
My go-to sources, in order:
- Google autocomplete and the People Also Ask box
- Search Console queries with impressions and few clicks
- Customer emails, chats, and sales calls
That first source tops the list for a reason. Semrush found People Also Ask beside 90.03% of AI Overviews, so the questions Google already shows are the ones its AI is answering.
For the second source, open the Performance report in Search Console, add a query filter, and pick the custom regex option. A pattern like who|what|how|why|can|does pulls every question your store already shows up for. Export the list and you have your first batch of pages and FAQ entries.
Once you have 20 or so, sort them by money instead of search volume. A sizing question on your bestseller beats a trivia question with ten times the searches, and I walk through that sort for stores in AEO for ecommerce.
2. Answer in the First Sentence
Answering in the first sentence is the highest-payoff habit on this AEO checklist. Kevin Indig’s study of 1.2 million ChatGPT answers found 44.2% of citations came from the first 30% of a page, so the engine reads the top and quotes what it finds there.
So the sentence under each heading carries the answer, and the context, caveats, and story come after it. Take a heading like “How long does shipping take?” as the example.
Most stores open that section with “We know how much fast delivery matters to our customers.” The version that gets quoted opens with “Standard shipping takes 3 to 5 business days in the US, and orders placed before 2 p.m. Central ship the same day.”
If the heading asks a question, the next sentence answers it.
It feels blunt the first few times you write this way. But it is the same structure I use to rank pages in Google AI Overviews, and it costs nothing but discipline.
3. Keep Every Answer Short Enough to Quote
Keeping every answer short enough to quote means two or three sentences an engine can lift whole. Microsoft’s Bing team describes the target as “one- to two-sentence responses that directly address a question” and sentences that still make sense when pulled out of context.
My own rule is 325 characters or less for the first paragraph under a heading. That short block is the unit answer engine optimization works in, and anything longer buries the part worth quoting.
A quick test is to read your answer out loud. If you can’t finish it in one breath, trim until it stands alone, then put the longer explanation below it for the reader who wants depth.
Just know that short is not the same as chopped up. Google’s guide to optimizing for generative AI says there is no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces, and no ideal page length. The page can run as long as the topic needs, but the answer under each heading can’t.
4. Give Each Question One Page
Giving each question one page keeps your site from splitting its own vote. When three of your pages half-answer the same question, an engine has no clear page to quote and often picks a competitor’s.
Google’s guide goes further. It warns against creating separate content for every variation of how people might search, calls that an ineffective long-term strategy, and adds that “a high quantity of pages doesn’t make a website higher quality or more relevant to users.”
The fix takes an afternoon. Search Google for site:yourstore.com plus the question and see how many of your pages come back. Then pick the one with the most impressions in Search Console, fold the others into it, and redirect the old URLs. One strong page beats five thin cousins.
On Shopify, the usual offenders are a blog post, an FAQ entry, and a policy page all answering the returns question in slightly different words. Mass-produced question pages are also one of the 7 AEO mistakes that cost citations, so merge before you publish anything new.
5. Write Headings as Questions
Writing headings as questions lets an AEO page mirror the query. In that same ChatGPT study, 78.4% of the citations tied to questions came from headings, so a heading that matches the shopper’s wording gives the engine a clean place to land.
| Label Heading | Question Heading |
|---|---|
| Pricing Considerations | How Much Does It Cost? |
| Shipping Information | How Long Does Shipping Take? |
| Sizing | Does It Run Small? |
| Learn More | What Makes This Dishwasher Quieter Than Most Models? |
That last row is Microsoft’s own example. Its guidance says headings “act like chapter titles that define clear content slices,” which is a formal way of saying the heading tells the machine what the next paragraph answers.
Pull the wording from People Also Ask when it exists. On a product or collection page, this usually lands as a short FAQ block near the bottom: questions in the customer’s words, short answers, no filler.
6. Put a Number Next to Every Claim
Putting a number next to every claim gives an engine something concrete to repeat. The text ChatGPT cited most in Indig’s data averaged 20.6% proper nouns, against 5% to 8% in typical writing, so names, prices, and figures get quoted and adjectives don’t.
So swap “fast shipping” for “ships in 2 business days” and “customers love it” for “4.8 stars across 1,200 reviews.” When several numbers land in one section, put them in a small table with clear headers.
Your Shopify admin already holds most of what you need. Review counts, return rates, reorder rates, and average delivery times are all sitting in reports you can pull in a few minutes, and no competitor has the same ones.
Also, link each stat to where it came from. A specific number is an argument, and a round guess is an opinion. Adding statistics is one of the best-tested edits in the research too, which is why it sits near the top of my GEO checklist.
7. Let the Right Crawlers In
Letting the right crawlers in is the AEO checklist point that zeroes out the other nine when it fails. Google only uses pages that are indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and ChatGPT only shows sites that allow its search crawler.
Which bot does ChatGPT search use?
ChatGPT search uses OAI-SearchBot, which is separate from GPTBot, the crawler that collects training data. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers,” and that a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to register.
So you can block training and still show up in answers. Just check that a blanket rule in robots.txt isn’t turning away both.
Do you need an llms.txt file?
You do not need an llms.txt file for Google. Its guide says creating one “will neither harm nor help your site’s visibility or rankings in Google Search,” since Google Search ignores them.
That’s why I’d spend the hour on content, and be wary of any AEO agency that bills for the file.
What else blocks AI crawlers?
A firewall can block AI crawlers even when robots.txt lets them in. Cloudflare changed its default in July 2025 so every new domain is asked whether to allow AI crawlers, with blocking as the starting point, and it handles traffic for about 20% of the web.
When in doubt, the URL Inspection tool in Search Console settles the Google side fast: paste the page and see exactly what Google can see.
8. Show First-Hand Proof
Showing first-hand proof is the part of the AEO checklist a competitor can’t copy: your test results, your customer data, your photos, your before and after. Google’s guide calls this non-commodity content and gives a pair of examples.
“7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers” is the commodity version. “Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line” is the one Google says goes beyond common knowledge.
For a store, the same split looks like “5 Benefits of Merino Wool” against “We Washed Our Merino Tee 50 Times and Measured It.” Any company can write the first one, and only you can write the second.
I’ve watched this work on a client store. One Fieldsheer buying guide hit #1 for “best heated jackets for women” within two weeks, got cited in Google’s AI Overview in the same window, and by spring 2026 ChatGPT named the brand its top pick. The full sequence is in the Fieldsheer case study.
That same gap is how smaller stores take seats in AI answers from bigger brands, which I cover in can small brands beat big brands in AI answers.
9. Earn Mentions Off Your Site
Earning mentions off your site matters to AEO because answer engines read far more than your website. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found YouTube mentions had the strongest correlation with AI visibility, at about 0.737, with branded web mentions close behind at 0.66 to 0.71.
That is a correlation, not a recipe, and you can’t fake your way into it. Google’s guide says seeking inauthentic mentions “isn’t as helpful as it might seem.”
To see where you stand today, search your brand name plus “reddit” and then search it on YouTube. Whatever comes back is roughly what an answer engine has to work with, and for most small stores it is close to nothing.
So show up where your customers already talk. Answer questions in the subreddits they read, send product to the YouTube reviewers they watch, and let the mentions pile up. Reddit threads and forum posts shape AI answers about brands, often more than the brand’s own pages do.
One useful answer in a thread your buyers read beats ten posts on a blog nobody has found yet.
10. Track What the Engines Quote
Tracking what the engines quote closes the AEO checklist, since you can’t improve citations you never see. The whole routine is three checks, once a month:
- Search Console’s generative AI performance report, which shows impressions only and reached every site on August 31, 2026
- Sessions in GA4’s AI Assistant channel, plus referrals from perplexity.ai and any tool the channel misses
- Your top ten money questions asked in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, with a note of who gets cited
The GA4 part takes about five clicks, and my setup is in how to track AI traffic in GA4. On the third check, ask each question a few times, because AI answers change from run to run and one screenshot is not a ranking.
Keep the log simple while you’re at it. A sheet with the question, the engine, the date, and whether you were cited is enough to show a trend after three months.
Even with all three in place, don’t judge the work on sessions alone. Fewer clicks reach every site now, so a flat traffic graph can hide growing visibility. If you’d rather hand the monthly check to someone, it is part of my AI search services for Shopify stores.
Which AEO Checklist Points Come First?
Point 7 comes first on the AEO checklist, then points 2 and 3 on the ten pages that already get the most impressions. Access problems cancel everything else, and answer edits on pages Google already shows pay off fastest.
After that, I’d work points 4 through 6 one page at a time, since merging pages, rewriting headings, and adding numbers all happen in the same editing pass. Points 8 and 9 take the longest because proof and mentions build over months, so start them early and let them run in the background.
Whatever order you pick, set up point 10 before you change anything. A baseline from this month is the only way to know next quarter whether the edits worked.
Want This Checklist Run on Your Store?
Ten points and no tools to buy: real questions, first-sentence answers, short passages, one page per question, question headings, numbers, crawl access, first-hand proof, off-site mentions, and tracking. Points 2 and 7 are the quickest to fix, so start there.
Book a call and I’ll check your top pages against the points that matter most for your store, then tell you which three fixes would earn citations fastest. If you want all ten handled every month, that is what my AI search services are for.
Sources:
- Semrush: AI Overviews Study
- Search Engine Land: ChatGPT Citations Content Study
- Microsoft Advertising: Optimizing Your Content for Inclusion in AI Search Answers
- Google Search Central: Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features
- OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI Crawlers
- Cloudflare: AI Crawlers Blocked by Default
- Ahrefs: Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews
