Ask an AI which suppliers exist in your field and it will not hand back ten pages for you to sort through. It writes a short list, and it names its sources. Whether your site has anything worth quoting decides where you land.
AI picks people by quoting them, not by ranking them
A search engine sorts links. An AI writes an answer, and to write it, it needs material — your site, your articles, other people's writing about you. Material that is clear and consistent is material it can safely use.
So the goal is not to reverse-engineer an algorithm. It is to make yourself an easy source. Here are six checks.
The six checks
1. Can the first screen of your homepage say what you sell and to whom?
Open your homepage. Look only at the first screen — not the About page, not the menu. Just what you see immediately.
Does that text contain a specific product and a specific buyer?
- "Committed to being a world-leading one-stop solution provider" — fails. An AI copying that into an answer tells the reader nothing.
- "Precision stainless steel parts, machined for industrial equipment makers in Europe and North America, low minimum order" — passes. Product, buyer, and difference in one line.
If it fails, rewrite it. This line is not only for AI. Human visitors use it to decide whether to scroll at all.
2. Do you have an FAQ?
Take the five questions buyers ask most and put them on the page, question and answer, in the buyer's own words. How do I specify tolerances, what is the minimum order, what is the lead time, what is the inspection standard, how do I get a sample.
An FAQ is the most usable material there is. The mapping between question and answer is unambiguous, so an AI can lift a whole pair and use it directly.
Write it in buyer language, not your internal language. Buyers search for "minimum order quantity," not your part family name.
3. Are your company details the same everywhere?
Write down your company name, address, phone and email. Then compare across: your site footer, your contact page, your LinkedIn page, industry directory listings, any document you have sent out.
Does the legal name match in every place? Is one listing missing the country? Is the phone number formatted differently on one platform?
AI builds entity profiles from cross-references. The same company written five different ways reads as five different companies, and none of them gets a complete profile. This check is the easiest to run and the most commonly skipped.
4. Are key specs in a table?
Tolerances, model comparisons, differences between configurations — buried in paragraphs, an AI has to dig them out. In a table, it reads them straight off.
A table is also the format AI systems most readily carry into an answer. The same facts, laid out differently, are not equally quotable.
5. Can AI actually reach you?
Three things, all checkable in a browser.
robots.txt. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Some site templates block AI crawlers by default without the owner ever knowing.
Speed from overseas. Run PageSpeed Insights once. This is the most overlooked item on the list: your site may open instantly where you are and crawl for an overseas visitor or crawler. A page that never finishes loading does not get quoted.
Clean URLs. Keep parameters and session strings out of the address. A shallow, readable structure is how a crawler finds the next page.
6. Is anyone else writing about you?
The first five are yours to fix. This one is not entirely.
Search your company name and your product terms. Besides your own site, who else writes about you — industry directories, trade press, customer supplier lists, exhibition catalogues, marketplace listings?
If every result is your own page, an AI looking for third-party confirmation finds none. You cannot fix this by editing your homepage. It accumulates over months, and it sets your ceiling.
After the audit, do these three
- Rewrite the first screen. Fix it today; it takes effect immediately.
- Add an FAQ. Start with five questions, as a section or a page.
- Unify your company details. Make one list, fill in what each platform says, and correct the mismatches.
Passing all six does not mean AI recommends you next week. It still needs third-party material to cross-check, and that takes months. But a site that fails these checks gives a third party nothing to quote even when it wants to.
To see what this looks like as a service, see GEO · AI search optimization. To find out where your site actually stands, ask for a free acquisition audit — the report is actionable on its own, and there is no obligation to work with me.
Two related reads: how AI answers a real set of category questions right now, in what AI named when asked about 20 product categories; and the order to fix things in, in the first 90 days of SEO for a factory website.
FAQ
Do I need any tools for this checklist?
No. Everything is checked by hand in a browser, in about an hour. For loading speed, use Google PageSpeed Insights — it's free and needs no install.
Several items failed. Which do I fix first?
The first screen of your homepage. It's the first material an AI reads about you, and the only chance a human visitor gets to decide whether you are relevant. Both readers start there.
If everything passes, will AI start citing me?
Not guaranteed. Passing means you have something worth quoting. Whether you make the list also depends on third parties writing about you. But without this, third parties have nothing to quote.