AI Buyer Proof Self-Audit

Your tool has been reviewed by an independent editorial panel (not self-reported).

Answer engines and AI shopping agents prefer citable third-party verdicts over marketing claims.

You publish benchmark evidence or receipts (dated, with methodology) — not just marketing claims.

'Industry-leading accuracy' is noise. '94% on MTEB, June 2026, run ID abc123' is a citable fact AI agents trust.

Your site clearly separates sponsored or paid content from editorial content.

AI answer engines weight editorial independence. Mixed signals between paid and organic content erode citation trust.

Your product page includes SoftwareApplication or Product JSON-LD structured schema.

Schema lets AI crawlers extract pricing, category, and ratings without guessing from prose.

You have published an /llms.txt at your domain root.

llms.txt gives AI agents a canonical, low-token summary of your product — name, pricing, use cases, citation rules.

You expose a machine-readable /facts or /data endpoint (JSON, not a PDF).

Structured JSON endpoints allow AI agents to quote pricing and integrations exactly rather than paraphrase.

You maintain a public changelog with ISO 8601 dates (YYYY-MM-DD) for each release.

Freshness signals matter. A competitor that published last week ranks above a better tool that hasn't updated in 6 months.

Your pricing page names explicit tiers, prices, and limits (not just 'contact us').

If an AI can't quote your price, it skips you for a competitor whose page says '$29/month for 500 requests'.

Every key page has a rel='canonical' tag and a sitemap.xml entry with <lastmod> dates.

Without canonical tags, answer engines split authority across URL variants and under-cite your product.

Your robots.txt explicitly allows AI crawlers: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Anthropic-AI.

Overly broad bot blocks can accidentally exclude the crawlers that power ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude answers.

You have a /vendor-brief or /press page answering: what it is, who it's for, what it costs, what it integrates with.

When an AI agent researches tools in your category, a structured vendor brief is the fastest path to accurate citation.

You've confirmed your tool is cited accurately (not hallucinated) in at least one AI answer engine.

Being citeable and being cited are different. Manual spot-checks in ChatGPT and Perplexity close the loop.