Clear the technical baseline
None of this wins on its own. All of it is disqualifying if missing.
Inside this
- One H1 per page, sequential heading hierarchy45m
Sequential headings appear on 68.7% of ChatGPT-cited pages against 23.9% of Google’s top results, and 87% of cited pages have a single H1 (AirOps, 2025). It is a correlation, not proof that headings cause citation.
- Generate sitemap.xml automatically30m
Hand-maintained sitemaps rot within a month. Generate it from your routes.
- Allow crawling in robots.txt and name the sitemap10m
A staging Disallow shipped to production is the single most common launch-week disaster.
- Add canonical tags to every page30m
You will syndicate to Medium and Dev.to in Phase 2. Canonicals are what stop that hurting.
- Add OG and Twitter card images45m
Every share for the next two years renders through these. Make them readable at thumbnail size.
- Pass Core Web Vitals on mobile2h
Test on a throttled 4G profile, not your laptop.
- Read your own page the way a crawler does30m
Fetch it with JavaScript disabled: one audited site was serving hundreds of Lorem Ipsum pages to crawlers while looking finished in a browser.
- Confirm Google has indexed every page that takes money15m
Homepage, pricing, signup and your best feature page. A page Google has not indexed cannot rank and cannot appear in an AI Overview, and a nosnippet tag keeps it out of the AI answers even when it is indexed. Until these four pass, a deeper technical audit can wait.