Full Answer

The audit covers five layers, each one a point where AI engines either find what they need or move on to a competitor. Structured data validation comes first — run every key page through Google's Rich Results Test and check whether Product, FAQ, and HowTo JSON-LD schema are present, complete, and error-free. Incomplete schema is the most common failure: a WooCommerce product page might have basic Product markup but miss fields like availability, review count, or shipping details that AI shopping engines need to make a recommendation.

Content formatting is the second layer. Each page should follow answer-first structure — the direct answer in the opening sentences after every heading, not buried in a conclusion. AI engines extract the first one or two sentences as the candidate citation. Pages that build toward an answer instead of leading with one get skipped.

Crawler access is the third check and often the most overlooked. A single robots.txt rule blocking GPTBot or ClaudeBot removes your entire site from that engine's citation pool. The audit also reviews server-side tracking configuration — Google AI Mode strips referrer headers, so without server-side capture you can't measure whether fixes are working.

The final layer is competitive benchmarking. The product data quality validation guide details the specific fields and thresholds AI engines evaluate. Auditing which competitors already appear in AI answers for your key queries shows where the structural gaps are and which fixes deliver the fastest visibility gains.