Free AI SEO for Your Website: A One-Hour Fix List

An hour won't make AI engines recommend you. It can find the things that stop them reading you at all.

The evidence on AI search is strongest about access. Server-side rendering, per-bot robots.txt permission, network reachability, index eligibility and snippet controls all have documented mechanisms from the engines themselves. Every one works by removing a block. No markup, phrasing or page structure has credible evidence that it adds visibility.

So this list is subtractive. You check four gates, fix what is broken, and stop. If you want the wider picture first, the free GEO audit covers access and then accuracy in the same order.

Minutes 0 to 15: let the search bots in

1. Open https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser.
2. Look for a blanket block such as User-agent: * with Disallow: /, or named AI bots with Disallow: /.
3. Separate training bots from search bots. OpenAI's crawler documentation says GPTBot governs training and OAI-SearchBot governs ChatGPT search, and that each setting is independent. Blocking GPTBot does not remove you from ChatGPT search.
4. Make sure the search bots you care about are allowed:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

There is no robots.txt token for Google AI Overviews or AI Mode. Googlebot access is the control there.

Minutes 15 to 25: test the firewall

robots.txt can say yes while your CDN says no. OpenAI's help page says eligibility needs both: allow OAI-SearchBot, and confirm your host or CDN allows traffic from its published IP addresses.

1. Run curl -I -A "OAI-SearchBot" https://yourdomain.com/pricing and look at the status code.
2. A 403, a 429, or an HTML challenge page means something is turning bots away.
3. Check your CDN's bot settings. As of 15 September 2026, Cloudflare blocks Training and Agent crawlers by default on ad-displaying pages for new domains and existing free-tier customers, while Search stays allowed. You can lose access without editing anything.

A curl from your laptop is a rough test. Some firewalls verify the bot's IP, so the real crawler may get a different answer.

Minutes 25 to 35: remove accidental snippet suppression

Google documents noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet:0 and data-nosnippet as controls that keep content out of its AI features. Bing applies data-nosnippet to its AI summaries too.

1. View the source of your homepage, pricing page and top product pages.
2. Search for noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet.
3. Remove any you didn't mean to set. Templates often carry them from a cookie banner or staging build.
4. Where Search Console shows the generative AI inclusion control, check it. Inclusion is the default, but a child property can inherit an opt-out from its parent.

Minutes 35 to 50: put key facts in raw HTML

Vercel's crawler study found that ChatGPT and Claude crawlers fetch JavaScript files but do not execute them. Googlebot renders. Most others don't.

1. Run curl -s https://yourdomain.com/pricing | grep -i "49", swapping in your real price.
2. Repeat for your product name, plan names and one-line description.
3. Anything that only appears after JavaScript runs is invisible to those crawlers. Note each one for a developer. The SSR and prerendering rollout plan covers the fix.

Minutes 50 to 60: fix contradicting facts

1. Write down your price, founding year, location and plan names from the pricing page.
2. Compare them with the about page, footer and any schema block.
3. Correct every mismatch so one fact reads one way everywhere.

The free brand fact consistency check walks through this in more detail.

Sort every finding into one of two piles.

• Broken gate. A search bot blocked in robots.txt, a 403 from your CDN, a stray nosnippet, a price missing from raw HTML. Fix these first. Each one can remove a page from an engine's reach.
• Inconsistency. Two prices, two founding years. Fix these next. A specific fact stated once, clearly, on a page that can be fetched gives an engine a sentence it can quote.

If a fix needs a developer, write it as a ticket with the URL, the exact header or tag, and the expected result. The developer tickets playbook has templates.

Be clear about what sits outside your control.

• Parametric answers. When an engine answers without searching, it relies on what the model learned before its cutoff. Nothing you change this quarter reaches that.
• Retrieval. Engines rewrite queries and decide per question whether to search. You can't see those queries.
• Selection. Which retrieved pages get cited is the model's call.

Google's AI features page says eligibility requires indexing and snippet eligibility, and that indexing and serving still isn't guaranteed. Passing every check makes you eligible. Timing varies too, which how long AI visibility work takes explains.

Skip the popular tactics with no evidence behind them.

• Schema for citations. Ahrefs' matched test of 1,885 pages found AI Overview citations fell 4.6% after schema was added. Existing markup does no harm, but it isn't a lever.
• llms.txt. Google says Search ignores it, and no other engine documents reading it. See why to think before making an llms.txt.
• Rewriting for AI. Google's AI optimization guide says you don't need to write in a special way for generative AI search. The comparison of rewrites and access fixes covers the research.

Doing this by hand is fine for a handful of pages. For a structured pass, 99Visibility's free AI Content Checklist gives you a list to work through page by page.

After the fixes, the free checker on this site shows whether AI engines name you for up to three buyer questions. Treat it as a snapshot, not a verdict.