GEO Checklist — Before You Publish

1. Direct answer in the opening

The first 150 words should answer the headline question plainly — who, what, when, why. LLMs extract ledes first. Vague introductions that bury the answer reduce citation likelihood even when the rest of the article is strong.

2. Heading hierarchy

Use at least three H2/H3 headings that mirror sub-questions a reader (or LLM) would ask. Each section should stand alone as a citable unit. Avoid walls of prose without structural breaks.

3. FAQ or Q&A block

Add a FAQ section covering 3–5 common follow-up questions. Question-and-answer format maps directly to how answer engines compose responses. Schema-friendly FAQ blocks help both Google and generative retrieval.

4. Numbered steps for how-to content

Procedural content should use numbered lists or explicit step labels. Models cite step-by-step instructions more reliably than narrative paragraphs describing the same process.

5. Entity clarity and attribution

Name your brand, products, and sources explicitly. Claims should be attributable — "According to [source]" or "In [year], [company] found…" — not anonymous generalities LLMs cannot verify or quote.

6. Internal links to authority pages

Link to your own published articles on related topics. A dense internal link graph signals topical authority to both crawlers and retrieval systems evaluating which domain to cite for a given query.

7. Crawl readiness

Confirm robots.txt allows AI crawlers you want (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.). Verify /llms.txt is served. Check sitemap.xml is accessible. Run GPTBot prerender if your stack uses client-side rendering — invisible content is uncitable content.

8. Run GEO Score

Before publish, run LLM Lens / GEO Score in Content Agents. Review coverage_score and the top aeo_suggestions. Fix structural issues flagged in the pre-publish checklist. Pair with traditional SEO analysis for keyword and SERP calibration.