★ CHECKLIST · 10 MIN AUDIT
Audit your Chicago business for AI search in ten minutes.
ten checks that decide whether a model cites you or skips you.
Generative engine optimization is not mysterious. Either an AI can read your site, corroborate it, and quote it — or it cannot. Work down this list with your homepage open. Each item takes a minute or two and ends in a pass condition. Score yourself honestly; the failures are the work.
01 · 1 min
State what you are, in one sentence
Open your homepage. Find a single declarative sentence naming the business, the trade, and the neighborhoods served — e.g. "Brothers Heating installs and services furnaces, boilers, and mini-splits in Logan Square, Humboldt Park, and Bucktown." No sentence like that, no citation. Models quote sentences, not slogans.
PASS · One sentence, above the fold, with trade + city + service area.
02 · 1 min
Check your name, address, phone as text
Select your phone number with the cursor. If it does not highlight, it is an image and no AI can read it. Same for the address. Confirm the business name is spelled identically in the title tag, the footer, and your Google Business Profile.
PASS · NAP is selectable text and identical across site and GBP.
03 · 1 min
Look for LocalBusiness schema
View source and search for "application/ld+json". You want a LocalBusiness (or trade-specific subtype like Plumber or HVACBusiness) block with name, address, areaServed, telephone, and url. Missing or malformed schema is the single most common reason a local site never gets cited.
PASS · One valid LocalBusiness block that validates in Google's Rich Results Test.
04 · 1 min
Count your service pages
A single "Services" page with a bulleted list gives an AI nothing to quote. Each major service needs its own URL, its own H1, and roughly two hundred words of specific copy — what the job involves, what it costs, how long it takes, which neighborhoods you do it in.
PASS · One indexable page per core service, each 200+ words.
05 · 1 min
Read your headings alone
Skim only the H1, H2s, and H3s. If that outline does not tell a stranger what you do and where, crawlers get the same nothing. One H1 per page. H2s for each real section. No headings used purely for font size.
PASS · Heading outline reads as a coherent summary on its own.
06 · 2 min
Add an FAQ in real question form
Write down the five questions customers actually ask on the phone. Put them on the page word-for-word as headings with short, factual answers, and mark them up with FAQPage schema. Question-shaped content matches question-shaped prompts.
PASS · Five real questions on-page with FAQPage JSON-LD.
07 · 2 min
Audit your Google Business Profile
Categories correct and specific. Full hours, including holiday hours. A written business description. Recent photos. At least one review in the last thirty days. AI answers about local services lean heavily on this record.
PASS · Profile complete, description written, review within 30 days.
08 · 3 min
Search for yourself the way a customer would
Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity three real questions — "who repairs flat roofs in Bridgeport", "emergency plumber near Wicker Park", "best HVAC company Logan Square". Note whether you are named, which competitors are, and which pages get cited.
PASS · Named in at least one of three queries.
09 · 3 min
Check who else says you exist
Models corroborate claims across sources. Confirm consistent listings on Yelp, Angi, BBB, your trade association, and any Chicago neighborhood directory. Mismatched addresses and old phone numbers actively suppress citations.
PASS · Five or more consistent third-party listings.
10 · 2 min
Make the site fast and crawlable
Confirm robots.txt does not block crawlers, a sitemap.xml exists, and pages render without JavaScript-only content. Many AI crawlers do not execute scripts — if your copy only appears after hydration, it is invisible to them.
PASS · Copy present in raw HTML; sitemap live; robots.txt permissive.
Scoring it
Eight or more passes and you are already in the running for citations; fix the rest and monitor. Five to seven, and you have structure but no corroboration — start with schema, service pages, and listings. Under five, the site was built for 2015 Google and needs rebuilding rather than patching.
Want the automated version? The free AEO Check runs these tests against your URL and puts real customer questions through ChatGPT-class engines. For the reasoning behind each check, read the GEO guide.