The AI Visibility Checklist.
Millions of people now ask AI assistants "who should I hire?" instead of Googling. These assistants answer from what they can find and understand about your business. Twelve checks. No email required. Work through them in an afternoon.
Say what you do in plain words, on the first screen"We fix leaking roofs in Allentown" beats "synergistic roofing solutions." AI assistants quote pages they can summarize in one sentence — give them that sentence.
One page per service, with your city in the titleA single "Services" page listing everything ranks for nothing. "Emergency Plumber in Bethlehem" as its own page can rank — and be cited — for exactly that query.
Complete your Google Business ProfileCategories, hours, services, photos, description, service area. This is the single highest-leverage local listing you have, and most businesses leave it half-empty.
Get reviews — and reply to every oneAssistants weigh review count, recency, and rating heavily when recommending local businesses. Ask happy customers directly. Reply to all reviews, good and bad, like a human.
Publish an FAQ page with real customer questions"How much does X cost?" "Do you serve my town?" "How fast can you come out?" AI assistants lift answers verbatim from FAQ-style content. Write the questions customers actually ask you.
Add LocalBusiness structured dataA small block of schema.org JSON-LD on your pages tells machines your name, address, phone, hours, and services unambiguously. Ten minutes of work, permanent payoff.
Keep your name, address, and phone identical everywhere"St." vs "Street," suite numbers, old phone numbers — inconsistencies across your site, Google, Yelp, and directories confuse both search engines and AI models.
Make your pages fast on phonesCompress images, drop the page-builder bloat. If your homepage takes six seconds on a phone, assistants and customers alike move on to the competitor that loads in two.
Write like a human, not a keyword list"Best plumber Bethlehem cheap plumber near me" reads as spam to models trained on natural language. Clear, specific prose about what you do and where wins.
Keep an About page with real names and a real placeModels are cautious about recommending faceless businesses. Named people, a real address, photos of actual work — that's what "trustworthy" looks like to a machine reader.
Don't block the AI crawlers you wantCheck your robots.txt. If you've blocked GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot, those assistants can't read your site at all. Block only what you mean to block.
Get mentioned by othersLocal press, chamber of commerce, supplier pages, community sponsorships. Assistants treat independent mentions as credibility votes — the same way classic search treats links.
This checklist is 12 of the 20 checks in our paid audit
The $149 Hector SEO audit runs all of these plus eight technical checks, writes up everything in plain English, and delivers a prioritized fix list within 48 hours.