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

A developer built small Claude/Cursor skills that audit web pages for AI-search readiness and found three recurring gaps: missing or contradictory AI-crawler rules in robots.txt, absent or stale llms.txt files, and JSON-LD structured data that doesn't match the visible page. Checking public sites, the developer found stripe.com served an llms.txt while anthropic.com returned 404, and one payments explainer had a null author, missing dateModified and a brand-suffixed headline. The developer cautions the checks only remove cheap reasons a page might be skipped, not guarantee citation.

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. 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. 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. Open view-source, search for application/ld+json , and compare it with what a reader sees: 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. 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 https://payhip.com/b/TvxJH . Paid packs exist, but nothing in this post needs them.