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Forty practical checks across technical foundations, on-page, content, AI search readiness, and tracking — each with a one-line explanation of what done looks like. Check items off as you go; progress saves in your browser, so you can work through it over days, not one sitting.
Free · Unlimited checks · No signup required
Step 1
Start at the top
The sections are ordered by priority: technical foundations first, because nothing else matters if engines can't crawl you.
Step 2
Check items off
Each item is a concrete, verifiable task with a one-line definition of done — no vague 'do SEO better' entries.
Step 3
Use the linked tools
Several items link straight to the free Meev tool that verifies them — validate robots.txt, metadata, links, and more in seconds.
Step 4
Come back and re-run
Progress saves in your browser. Re-walk the list quarterly — SEO is maintenance, not a one-time project.
Why it matters
Most underperforming sites don't have a strategy problem — they have a missing-canonical problem, a blocked-crawler problem, a no-internal-links problem. Each gap is small and invisible on its own; together they quietly cap what any amount of content can achieve. A checklist works because it forces you to verify the unglamorous fundamentals everyone assumes are already fine.
AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity reward the same foundations classic SEO does: crawlable pages, clear structure, genuine expertise. But they add new requirements — llms.txt, AI-crawler access, extractable answer-first formatting, and FAQ schema — that most sites haven't touched. Sites that cover both lists get found in both kinds of search; sites that only do classic SEO are invisible in the fastest-growing one.
Audits go stale the week they're delivered. A working checklist is different: it's the same 40 items every quarter, your progress persists between sessions, and re-walking it catches the regressions — the redirect someone broke, the post that went stale, the schema a redesign dropped. Treating SEO as a recurring maintenance loop is what separates sites that compound from sites that decay.
With Meev
The content and AI-readiness sections are where the recurring work lives — intent-matched articles, answer-first structure, FAQ schema, fresh publishing cadence. Meev does that part automatically, so your checklist time goes to the one-time technical wins.
Top to bottom — the sections are sequenced by dependency. Technical foundations come first because crawlability gates everything else; on-page and content follow because they're what engines actually rank; AI readiness builds on both; and tracking comes last because it measures the rest. Within a section, fix the items that touch your highest-traffic pages first.
Quarterly is the right cadence for most sites. Deploys break canonicals, content goes stale, redirect chains accumulate, and new AI-search requirements appear — a quarterly re-walk catches regressions while they're cheap to fix. Re-run it immediately after any major event: a redesign, a migration, a CMS change, or a traffic drop you can't explain.
About 80% overlaps — crawlability, structure, and quality content serve both. The AI-specific 20% is new: publishing an llms.txt file, allowing AI crawlers in robots.txt, formatting content so answers are extractable (definitional intros, FAQ blocks, question headings), citing sources, and monitoring whether AI assistants mention your brand at all. Classic checklists simply don't cover those, which is why this one has a dedicated section.
For most sites, meaningful movement takes 3–6 months and strong results take 6–12. Technical fixes can show impact within weeks because they unlock pages that already deserved to rank; new content takes longer because it has to be crawled, indexed, and trusted. AI-search visibility can move faster — AI engines refresh their view of the web more fluidly than classic rankings shift.
Get the foundations right before writing volume: HTTPS, a clean URL structure, an XML sitemap, a permissive robots.txt that allows both search and AI crawlers, and an llms.txt file. Then publish a small cluster of genuinely useful pages around one topic rather than scattering across many. A new site with 10 strong, interlinked pages on one theme outperforms one with 50 thin pages on ten themes.
No — impact is front-loaded. The technical and on-page sections fix the gaps that silently cap everything else, so completing the first 16 items often delivers more than the remaining 24 combined. Treat 100% as the quarterly maintenance target, not the entry bar; even a 60% site with the right 60% done will outperform most competitors.
Meev tracks your visibility across every major AI search surface and publishes quality-gated content that earns citations — automatically.
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Overall progress
Your progress saves automatically in this browser — come back anytime.