AI search readiness checklist for SaaS

This is a pass list for a SaaS marketing site. Each item is a control OpenAI, Perplexity, or Google Search Central has published, applied to a homepage, a pricing page, and a docs URL. It is not a citation forecast. None of the three publishes a rate for how often a passing page is quoted.

The longer on-page list, forty checks including writing and markup that go past these vendor docs, is the AI Citation Readiness Checklist. Use both. Where a crawler token is described differently, the vendor page wins, and the items below follow the vendor page. The engine essays are ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

ChatGPT search

• OAI-SearchBot may fetch the public host. OpenAI says a site opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it can still appear as a navigational link. Give the token its own group if User-agent: * disallows the whole site.
• GPTBot is a separate decision. OpenAI says the settings are independent. Disallowing GPTBot opts the site out of training use. It is not the search switch.
• ChatGPT-User is the person-triggered fetch. OpenAI says it is not an automatic crawl, robots.txt rules may not apply, and it is not used to decide Search appearance.
• The published IP ranges can connect. OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and allowing requests from searchbot.json. A 403 from the firewall is still a block. Search adjustments after a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours.

Perplexity search

• PerplexityBot may fetch the public host. Perplexity says this is the crawler that surfaces and links sites in Perplexity search, and that it is not the training crawler. Perplexity recommends allowing it.
• The WAF allows the user-agent and the current IPs. Perplexity’s crawler page tells you to combine the user-agent with the ranges in perplexitybot.json and perplexity-user.json, and to refresh those ranges. Robots changes can take up to 24 hours.
• Perplexity-User is not a second robots switch. Perplexity says that fetcher generally ignores robots.txt, because a person asked the question, and that it might visit a page and link it.

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode

• Googlebot can crawl the page, and the page can show a snippet. Google says that is the eligibility rule for a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. noindex and nosnippet take a page out of that set. There is no extra technical requirement, and meeting the rule does not guarantee indexing.
• Search Console is set to include the site. The optimization guide says a site must be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console. Include is the default. The control covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features in Discover.
• Google-Extended is decided on its own. Google says that token does not change Search inclusion or ranking. It governs Gemini training and grounding. Leaving AI Overviews is the Search Console control, not this token.
• The important sentences are text. Google’s list for these features includes important content in textual form, internal links, and structured data that matches the visible text if you use structured data. There is no special schema type to add, and Google says an llms.txt file neither helps nor harms Google Search.
• The page is one a customer needed. Google says a unique, first-hand page does more over time than a commodity summary, and that publishing a URL for every query variation in order to chase fan-out queries violates the scaled content abuse policy.

On a SaaS site, that looks like this

• One host. Google’s optimization guide says duplicate URLs waste crawling and make a worse page. The marketing site, the docs, and the pricing page should agree which host is canonical, and the homepage should link to the other two.
• The homepage says what the product is, in HTML. The name, who it is for, and what it does, as text. Google’s requirement is textual content, not a slogan inside an image. A login wall on that explanation means a crawler does not receive it.
• The price is text, if you publish a price. A number inside a screenshot is not the textual form Google describes. Docs that only render after JavaScript still need to follow Google’s JavaScript SEO guidance: Google says it can process JavaScript when the scripts are not blocked, and that those sites are harder to keep eligible.
• One comparison you can stand behind. Google’s example of non-commodity content is a specific account, not a rewritten list of tips. A single page about how your product differs, written from the product, fits that description. A cluster of near-duplicate “versus” URLs is the pattern the scaled content abuse note is about.
• Schema copies the page. If the homepage has Organization or Product JSON-LD, the name and the price in the script match the name and the price in the HTML. Google says markup is not required for AI Overviews. OpenAI’s crawler overview and Perplexity’s crawler page do not list a schema type.

Walk the same ground in more detail on the 40-point checklist. That page stores checkmarks in the browser and does not submit the URL.

Free check, the $39 audit, and the template pack

Run the free check on the marketing host. It reports homepage HTML, robots.txt for GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended, a non-empty llms.txt, a sitemap, and JSON-LD types on the homepage. It does not read OAI-SearchBot, Perplexity-User, or the Search Console generative AI control. Those three are still on you. A passing row is a signal on the file. It is not a live answer from any of the three engines.

The $39 GEO audit is one public URL, a 0–100 CiteScore, and about ten prioritized fixes, as a PDF. The score comes from on-page signals — definitions, entities, evidence, schema, freshness, crawler access — and, when a language-model key is configured, a review of the HTML we fetched. We do not log into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews. The per-engine snapshot is an inference, and the report says so.

The GEO Content Template Pack ($19) is a separate $19 purchase from the check and the audit.

Sources

• Overview of OpenAI Crawlers. OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, and the published IP list.
• Perplexity Crawlers. PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, and the WAF guidance.
• AI features and your website and optimizing for generative AI features on Google Search, Google Search Central. Eligibility, textual content, llms.txt, schema, and scaled content abuse.
• Google-Extended and the Search generative AI control.