Phase 1: Crawl Access Verification

Before assessing content quality, verify AI crawlers can access your site. Check robots.txt allows GPTBot (ChatGPT), PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended. Run each bot's user-agent through a robots.txt checker against your live file. Confirm your sitemap is submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Use a staging environment to test that JavaScript-dependent content renders in server-side HTML — AI crawlers may not execute JS.

Phase 2: Indexation Status Review

Pull your target URLs from Google Search Console's Pages report. Identify which are 'Indexed,' 'Discovered — not indexed,' 'Crawled — not indexed,' and 'Excluded.' Pages with indexation problems cannot be cited in AI answers. For each non-indexed page, diagnose the root cause: thin content, crawl budget exhaustion, canonicalization error, or manual action. Fix indexation issues before any content optimization.

Phase 3: Content Structure Scoring

Score each page 0–4 across four criteria. (1) Answer-first: does the page lead with a direct answer? (2) Question headings: are H2/H3 formatted as natural-language questions? (3) Specificity: does the content contain concrete data, examples, or named sources — not vague generalizations? (4) Completeness: does the page fully address the target query without requiring users to visit other pages? Pages scoring 0–1 are high-priority rewrites. Pages scoring 3–4 need only minor improvements.

Phase 4: Structured Data Audit

For each page, check whether applicable schema types are implemented and valid. Use OptiAISEO's schema scanner or manually inspect page source for JSON-LD blocks. Validate every schema against Google's Rich Results Test. Flag: missing FAQPage schema on Q&A content, missing HowTo schema on procedural content, Article schema without dateModified, schema that doesn't match visible page content.

Phase 5: AI Citation Spot-Check

Manually test your top 20 target keywords in ChatGPT (with browsing), Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Record: is your domain cited? If not, who is? What structural or content differences explain why competitors are cited instead? This qualitative analysis often reveals the most actionable improvements — not abstract metrics, but direct comparison against the pages actually winning citations.

Phase 6: Prioritization Matrix

After phases 1–5, rank all issues by: (Traffic × AEO Score Gap). High-traffic pages with low AEO scores are priority one. Low-traffic pages with low scores are lower priority unless they target strategically important keywords. For each prioritized page, create a specific remediation task: add FAQ schema, restructure intro, add data points, add author bio. Assign and track in your project management system.