Most pages we audit aren’t failing because of one big mistake, they’re failing because of a dozen small ones nobody’s ticked off.
To help with this we’ve made a simple checklist that shows one page, every element, split down the middle. We’ve included what Google needs to rank you on the left, and what AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews need to cite you on the right.
The left side covers the fundamentals we’ve all been putting in place for years; title tags, meta descriptions, headings, internal links, Core Web Vitals.
The right side is where it gets interesting, as AI models don’t read a page the way a people do. They pull out chunks, so every section needs to make sense on its own, and they favour pages that answer the question in the first couple of sentences. They also want to know who wrote it and why that person should be trusted.
The two sides aren’t in competition, a page that’s clear, well structured and genuinely useful tends to do well in both.
Save this so you can tick off every small action next time you publish a page.
