New Website SEO Checklist for AI Search

Most checklists for a new website are about Google rankings. That is fair, and this one covers the parts of it that matter. But they leave out something that is now part of launching a site: whether AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity can find your pages and describe your business correctly. We read two popular launch checklists in full, Hostinger's and Freeform Agency's. Both cover titles, analytics, page speed and links. Neither says a word about AI assistants.

A brand-new site also has a problem an older one does not: nothing else on the internet says who you are yet. An established business has reviews, directory listings, news mentions and years of pages pointing at it. A new one has a single source of facts, its own website. If that source is blocked, confusing or missing basic details, an AI assistant has nothing else to fall back on.

So this checklist is sorted by one question: how hard is this to change later? Some choices are cheap to get right before you launch and painful to fix afterward. Others are easy to switch on the day you go live. And some things only time and other people can give you, so the best you can do is prepare for them. That gives three parts:

1. Decide before you build. Hard to undo later.
2. Switch on at launch. Quick to do, easy to fix.
3. The first 90 days. Mostly waiting, with a few things worth doing while you wait.

Part 1: Decide Before You Build

These are the choices that turn into a "site move" if you change your mind later. A site move means redirects, lost links and a re-check of everything, which is what our site migration checklist walks through. It is far cheaper to get these right the first time.

1. Pick one address for your site and stay with it. Choose the domain name you intend to keep for years. Then decide whether the site lives at www.example.com or plain example.com, and make sure it always loads over the secure https version. Whichever you pick, set the others to forward to it. If two versions of your site both load on their own, search engines and AI crawlers see two copies and have to guess which one is real. Changing your domain later is the most expensive kind of move there is, so if you are still deciding between two names, decide now.

2. Choose page addresses you can live with. Every page has a web address, like /services/monthly-bookkeeping. Short addresses made of plain words are easier for people and software to understand than /page?id=482. Pick a pattern before you publish, because every address you change later needs a forwarding rule, and forwarding rules are one more thing to get wrong.

3. Check that your text is in the page itself, before you commit to a website builder. Some website builders send a nearly empty page and then use scripts in the visitor's browser to fill in the words. A person never notices. But a reader that does not run those scripts sees an empty page. You can test this in a minute, and you should do it on the builder's own demo site before you pay for anything:

• Open a demo page in Chrome.
• Right-click and choose View page source (or type view-source: in front of the address).
• Search for a sentence you can see on the screen.

If the sentence is in the source, the words are in the page. If it is not, that builder is a risk.

4. Write your business facts down once, and copy from that page forever. Before you write any page, make a one-page fact sheet:

• Your business name, spelled exactly one way
• Street address, or the areas you serve if you work at customers' homes or offices
• Phone number and email address
• Opening hours
• What you do, in one plain sentence
• Who runs it, and the year you started

Then copy from that sheet every time a form, profile or page asks for these details. Names drift more easily than you would think. Picture a bookkeeping firm that shows up as "Lindqvist Bookkeeping" on its site, "Lindqvist Book-keeping" on a directory and "Lindqvist Accounting" on a social profile. A person shrugs. A machine may count three different businesses. If you build an entity profile, you end up with this same sheet, kept in one place for every page and profile to read from. If you sell products, each product needs its own facts as well, and our online store guide covers those.

5. Plan the pages that show a real business is behind the site. These are the About page, the Contact page, a privacy page, a terms page, and, if you publish articles with bylines, a page for each author. They are cheap to write and they answer the first questions a stranger (or an AI system) has about a site it has never seen. Use plain, predictable addresses for them, such as /about and /contact. Our guide to the About page covers what to put on it.

6. Delete every placeholder before anyone can see it. A new site is full of leftovers: "Lorem ipsum" text, a "Coming soon" page, sample team names, and on WordPress the default "Hello world!" post and "Sample Page". Any of them can get read and kept. A wrong fact stated with confidence does more harm than a missing one.

Part 2: Switch On at Launch

These steps are quick, and none of them is hard to fix if you get it wrong. The danger is skipping them because the site "looks done."

1. Take off the blocks that protected the test version. While a site is being built it is usually hidden on purpose, with a noindex instruction, a blanket Disallow: / line in the robots.txt file (more on that next), or on WordPress the "Discourage search engines" box under Settings > Reading. The hiding stays on if nobody removes it, and no visitor can see it. Our guide to hidden noindex problems covers where each one hides.

2. Read your own robots.txt. Type your domain followed by /robots.txt into a browser. This small public file tells crawlers which parts of your site they may visit, and you want it short and boring. Look for Disallow: / under User-agent: *, which blocks everyone, and for any lines that name a crawler you want to let in. The one worth knowing is OAI-SearchBot, which OpenAI uses to find pages for ChatGPT's search answers. OpenAI says of it: "For search results, please note it can take ~24 hours from a site's robots.txt update for our systems to adjust" (OpenAI's crawler page). So fix any problem here first, because everything after it depends on it.

3. Publish a sitemap and tell both big search engines about it. A sitemap is a list of your pages that you hand to a search engine. Most website builders and WordPress SEO plugins make one for you, usually at /sitemap.xml. Then add your site to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, both free, and submit the sitemap in each.

Google is upfront that this is optional. Its own page says: "Google automatically looks for sites to add to our index; you usually don't even need to do anything except post your site on the web" (Google Search Central). The next sentence is the reason to do it anyway: "However, sometimes sites get missed." Submitting also gives you a report on which pages each engine accepted. Bing is worth the extra ten minutes because AI assistants have drawn on its results. Our sitemap guide covers both submissions step by step.

4. Ask Google to look at your key pages. In Search Console, use the URL Inspection tool on your home page and your two or three most important pages, and choose Request indexing. (Indexing just means a search engine adding a page to its list.) Do it once per page. Google's own instructions warn that "requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL won't get it crawled any faster," and that there is a quota on these requests. They also set expectations honestly: "Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks," and requesting a crawl "does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all" (Google's recrawl guide).

5. Read your own site like a stranger. Open a private browser window and visit your home page, About page and Contact page. Check each of these against your fact sheet:

• The business name is spelled the same way everywhere, including the page title in the browser tab.
• The address, phone number and email match, character for character.
• Nothing says "coming soon" or shows sample text.

Then look at the page source for a block that starts with application/ld+json. That block is structured data, which means hidden labels that state facts in a form software can read without guessing, such as your business name, website and logo. A small amount is enough on day one: one block describing your business, on your home page or your About page, not a separate copy on each. Most SEO plugins and website builders can add it, and our free Chrome extension will show what any single page is carrying.

6. Save your starting line. Before you change anything else, run a free readiness check on the live site and keep the report. Then ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity what they know about your business, and write down what each one says along with the date, so you can compare in week 12. On day one they will probably say nothing useful, and that is fine. You just need something to measure against.

Part 3: The First 90 Days

After launch day, there is a stretch where very little seems to happen. Knowing what is normal keeps you from making things worse. Here is what the sources actually say about timing:

What you are waiting for	What the source says	Source
Google noticing a new site	"It can take a few weeks for Google to notice a new site, or any changes in your existing site."	Google Search Central
Google acting on an indexing request	"Anywhere from a few days to a few weeks"	Google's recrawl guide
ChatGPT search reacting to a robots.txt change	About 24 hours	OpenAI's crawler page
An AI assistant describing your business correctly	No published timeline	Nobody publishes one

That last row is the honest one. Nobody can promise you a date, because it depends on how much the outside world has to say about you, and that is what you are about to build.

Take a made-up example: two people, Maya and Dev, launch Lindqvist Bookkeeping with a new domain, a new site and no reviews. In week one they ask ChatGPT about their firm and get a polite non-answer. In week four the answer is still thin. In week twelve, it finally names their town and their main service. Nothing happened in between that they could see. That is the pattern to expect.

Give AI a second place to check your facts. Right now your site is the only witness. Create a few profiles that repeat your fact sheet exactly:

• A Google Business Profile, if customers visit you or you serve a local area.
• A company page on a network like LinkedIn.
• One or two directories that are well known in your trade.

Use the same name, address and phone number everywhere, and link each profile to your site. Then link back from your site to the profiles you control. Structured data has a field called sameAs for exactly this, a list of other pages about the same business.

Publish a small set of pages that answer what customers really ask. Before you write more, cover the basics: what you do, who it is for, how much it costs or how pricing works, how to get started, and where you work. A dozen pages that answer real questions do more for you than a hundred thin ones. Google names the thin-page approach as spam. Its policy on scaled content abuse lists "using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users" as an example (Google's spam policies). A new site with no history that suddenly has hundreds of pages nobody needed is the kind of picture that policy is aimed at.

Get a few real links, and do not pay for them. Google lists "your site isn't linked to by other sites on the web" as one of the usual reasons a site gets missed. Its advice is to get linked, with one warning: "please don't pay them to link to you; that could be considered a violation of Google's spam policies" (Google Search Central). A few real links from real relationships, such as a supplier, a local association or a customer who likes you, are worth more than any package you can buy.

Keep your name, address and page addresses stable. Rebranding or reorganizing in month two resets the work you just did. If you truly must change something, treat it as the site move it is.

Re-check at weeks 4, 8 and 12. Each time, look at three things, in this order:

1. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools: how many of your sitemap's pages are listed as indexed? This is the number that should climb first.
2. The free readiness check: has your score moved from day zero, and which part of it changed?
3. The assistants: do they say anything different from your saved answers? Being named in an answer and being linked as a source are two different events, and our guide to AI visibility explains how to tell them apart.

If, by week eight, the pages are not indexed at all, go back to Part 2 and check the blocks again, because that is the first place to look. If the pages are indexed but assistants still know nothing about you, the gap is outside your website, and our guide on why ChatGPT doesn't know your business walks through how to close it.

Common Mistakes on a New Site

Only setting up Google. Bing takes ten minutes and it is one of the search engines AI assistants have drawn on.

Leaving your site as the only source. A site alone is one witness. A site plus a few matching profiles is a pattern.

Making profiles that do not match the site. A different spelling of the name, a different address or a missing suite number on one profile gives software a reason to doubt all of them.

Clicking "Request indexing" over and over. Google says repeat requests do not speed anything up, and there is a quota.

Publishing a hundred thin pages to look bigger. It reads as the spam pattern Google describes, and it buries the few pages that matter.

Paying for links because you have none. It is tempting, and Google says it can break its spam policies.

Judging by one question in week one. A blank answer in the first week tells you almost nothing. Compare against your saved starting line, not against your hopes.

The Whole List on One Screen

Before you build

• One address for the whole site, secure version, with the other versions forwarding to it
• Page addresses chosen
• Text confirmed to be in the page itself, checked on the builder's demo
• One-page fact sheet written
• About, Contact, privacy, terms (and author pages) planned
• Every placeholder deleted

At launch

• Test-site blocks removed (noindex, robots.txt, WordPress checkbox)
• robots.txt read and clean
• Sitemap published and submitted in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
• Indexing requested once for the key pages
• Home, About and Contact read in a private window against the fact sheet
• Day-zero report and AI answers saved

First 90 days

• Matching profiles created and linked both ways
• A small set of real question-and-answer pages published
• Name, address and page addresses left alone
• Re-checked at weeks 4, 8 and 12

If you want the "before" picture without doing it by hand, run a free readiness check on your new site today and keep the report.

FAQ

How long does it take for a new website to show up in Google?

Google says "it can take a few weeks for Google to notice a new site." Asking for indexing in Search Console can speed up individual pages, but Google's own instructions say crawling "can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks." If a site has none of the blocks described in Part 2, waiting is normal. If it is blocked, no amount of waiting will help.

Do I have to submit my new website to Google?

No. Google says you usually do not need to do anything except put your site on the web. We still recommend submitting a sitemap through Search Console, because the report it gives you shows which pages Google accepted and which it did not, and that is how you catch a problem early.

How long until ChatGPT knows about my new website?

Nobody publishes a timeline, so anyone quoting you a number is guessing. The one figure that does exist is narrow: OpenAI says it can take about 24 hours for a robots.txt change to reach ChatGPT's search. That only covers whether its crawler is allowed to read your pages. It says nothing about when an assistant will describe your business well, so measure that yourself at weeks 4, 8 and 12.

Do I need an llms.txt file on a new site?

It is optional, and it does not replace any step above. If your website platform creates one for you, fine. Do not spend launch week on it before you have checked for blocks and written down your facts.

Do I need structured data on day one?

A small amount is worth it: one set of labels for your business, on your home page or About page, matching your fact sheet. That gives software a clear statement of who you are instead of making it work that out from your wording. Add more, such as products, services and articles, as those pages appear.

Is a new site at a disadvantage in AI search?

What a new site lacks is history and outside mentions, not any special rule. An older business has years of pages and profiles that agree about it. Yours does not yet. That is why the plan above puts so much weight on a clear, consistent site first, and a few matching profiles second.