Three quick checks before you expect AI search to quote your page

I've been building small Claude/Cursor skills that review pages for AI-search readiness. Running them on public pages kept turning up the same three gaps.

You can check all three yourself in about ten minutes with curl and view-source. You don't need a tool.

1. Does robots.txt say anything about AI crawlers?

curl -s https://yoursite.com/robots.txt | grep -iE 'gptbot|claudebot|perplexitybot|google-extended|ccbot'

No output means you have no AI-specific rules, so these bots follow your User-agent: * group. That's fine if it's on purpose.

The problems I see are leftovers: a blanket Disallow someone added years ago, or a CDN/WAF bot rule that blocks crawlers the robots.txt says are allowed. Check both.

2. Do you have an llms.txt, and is it accurate?

curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' https://yoursite.com/llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed convention, not a standard, and no AI company has promised to read it. It's still cheap to add. Put a one-line summary of what you do at the top, then short sections linking your key pages.

When I checked on Nov 13, stripe.com returned 200 with exactly that layout, and anthropic.com returned 404. If you add one, keep it current. A stale llms.txt is worse than none.

3. Does your structured data agree with the visible page?

Open view-source, search for application/ld+json, and compare it with what a reader sees:

• author: is it null or missing while the page names a person or company?
• dateModified: the page says "Last updated March 2026", but is that date in the JSON-LD?
• headline: does it match the H1, or carry an extra "| Brand" suffix?

On one well-known payments explainer, all three were off: author was null, dateModified was missing even though the page showed a date, and the headline had a brand suffix. These take minutes to fix. Don't add FAQ or rating markup the page doesn't actually show.

What these checks won't tell you

None of this guarantees a citation. Nobody outside the AI companies knows exactly how sources get chosen. These checks only remove the cheap reasons a page might be skipped or misread.

Whether people are asking the question your page answers, and whether you answer it well in the first paragraph, matters more.

Disclosure: I make HubDev, a set of Claude/Cursor skills that run checks like these. If you'd rather have an agent score a page for you, there's a free starter scorecard (no purchase needed): https://payhip.com/b/TvxJH. Paid packs exist, but nothing in this post needs them.