An SEO checklist is the list of checks a website needs so that Google and AI assistants can read it, understand it and show it to the people searching. The versions going around have between 27 and 60 points, almost always sorted by category: on-page, off-page, technical.
Sorting them by category is convenient for whoever writes the list and useless for whoever uses it. Nobody opens the technical section on a Monday morning. Faced with sixty items, you need to know something else: which ones you do once, which ones you repeat for every page you publish, which ones you look at once a month and which ones once a year. This checklist is sorted that way.
It also has a second half that is usually missing: the checks to delete. Several checklists in circulation still contain items that Google's documentation contradicts in writing.
The five cadences
A check earns a place on the list if it passes three questions: does it change anything in the results, how often does it need redoing, and who actually does it. The third is the one that wrecks most plans, because in a company the monthly checks land on the desk of someone who already has other work.
| Cadence | What you check | Time | Who does it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Once only | Search Console and Analytics connected, robots.txt, XML sitemap, HTTPS, canonical tags, URL structure | 3-4 hours | whoever built the site |
| Every page you publish | Search intent, title, meta description, H1, slug, outgoing internal links, image alt text | 15-20 minutes per page | the writer |
| Every month | Queries in positions 8-20, pages with stable impressions and falling clicks, coverage errors, indexing of new pages | 1 hour | whoever handles SEO |
| Every quarter | Core Web Vitals on field data, broken links, duplicate content, backlink profile, SERP make-up in your sector | half a day | SEO or agency |
| Once a year | Site architecture, pruning dead content, reviewing service pages, checking redirects after migrations | 2-3 days | SEO and development |
Setup is done once and then left alone
These are the six checks that make the site readable. Search Console and Google Analytics connected and verified, a robots.txt that doesn't accidentally block the important folders, an XML sitemap submitted, HTTPS across the whole domain, consistent canonical tags and a readable URL structure with no dates in it.
It sounds obvious, and for anyone who already has a well-kept site it is. It is worth remembering what happens to those who skip this step: in a sample of around 14 billion pages analysed by Ahrefs in 2023, 96.55% get no traffic at all from Google and another 1.94% get between one and ten visits a month. That figure doesn't say ranking is impossible: it says that publishing without the minimum setup produces nothing.
For every page you publish
Seven checks, fifteen minutes. Start with search intent: look at the SERP for the query before you write and check that the dominant format is the one you are about to produce. If the top ten positions are product pages and you are writing a guide, the guide won't rank, however good it is.
Then the title with the keyword at the start, the meta description written after looking at what the top results' snippets have in common, a single H1, a short slug, two or three outgoing internal links to relevant pages and alt text on the images.
Two items that usually appear here can go straight away. The Google Search Central starter guide says that "the length of the content alone doesn't matter for ranking purposes (there's no magical word count target, minimum or maximum)" and, on the order of heading tags, that "it doesn't matter if you're using them out of order". A minimum word count and a perfect H1-H2-H3 hierarchy are two fewer boxes to tick.
Every month: an hour in Search Console
The monthly check is a single one, done properly. Open the queries report in Search Console for the last three months and filter positions 8 to 20: these are queries where the site is already visible and not being clicked, and twenty minutes of work on the page is usually enough to move them. It is the best effort-to-result ratio in SEO.
The second filter to look at is the pattern that has become the most common over the last two years: stable impressions and falling clicks on the same page. It doesn't mean you have dropped in position, it means the answer is being read before the click. On generic informational queries this happens systematically, and it is why traffic ends without a click even when rankings hold.
Two quick items remain: errors in the Page indexing report and a check that the pages published during the month have made it into the index.
Every quarter: the technical side
Core Web Vitals are read from field data, not from the lab test score. The thresholds published on web.dev are three and are measured at the 75th percentile of page loads, with mobile and desktop separated: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP within 200 milliseconds, CLS no higher than 0.1. INP became a stable metric in 2024, replacing FID, so a checklist that still talks about First Input Delay is two years out of date. The rest of the work on page speed starts from there.
Then a crawl with Screaming Frog or similar for broken links and redirect chains, a check for duplicate content, a pass over the backlink profile and a check of the structured data already in place.
Once a year: architecture and pruning
This is the only time it makes sense to question the structure. You check whether the categories still reflect what the business sells, delete or merge pages that haven't had a single visit in two years, rewrite the service pages and check that the redirects set up during migrations still point where they should. It is the work that normally sits inside a full SEO audit.
What you can delete from the checklist
Seven items that still turn up in checklists online, with the source that contradicts them. That is time freed up for the checks that matter.
| Item to remove | What the source says |
|---|---|
| Meta keywords tag | "Google Search doesn't use the keywords meta tag" (Google Search Central) |
| Minimum word count | "The length of the content alone doesn't matter for ranking purposes" (Google Search Central) |
| Heading hierarchy in perfect order | "It doesn't matter if you're using them out of order" (Google Search Central) |
| Keyword density as a target | Repeating the same word goes against Google's spam policies, and Google publishes no reference percentage |
| Domain Authority as a KPI | "There's no evidence that search engines use Domain Rating (or similar scores such as Domain Authority) as a ranking factor at all" (Ahrefs) |
| llms.txt file | Gary Illyes, Google Search Central Deep Dive APAC, 23 July 2025: Google doesn't support it and has no plans to (Search Engine Land) |
| Special markup for AI | "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features" (Google Search Central) |
Two clarifications, because the table is blunt and reality less so. An llms.txt file does no harm, it simply brings nothing on Google: if someone sells it to you as GEO work, you are paying for a text file. And structured data is still useful, for rich results and for keeping what the reader sees aligned with what the engine reads, it just isn't a requirement for appearing in generated answers. Keyword density works the same way in reverse: the problem isn't getting the percentage wrong, it's that the percentage doesn't exist.
How much AI really takes up in your SERP
Google's documentation on AI features contains a sentence worth reading in full: "there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary". That doesn't mean nothing has changed. It means the lever isn't an extra block of checks, it's knowing how much of your SERP is already taken up by AI. And that varies enormously.
Below is the SERP make-up for two Italian projects we monitor, same market and same month. The first is a B2B manufacturer, the second works in solar PV. Data from Keyword.com on Google Italy, September 2026.
| SERP element | Project A, B2B manufacturing (135 keywords) | Project B, solar PV (143 keywords) |
|---|---|---|
| AI Overview | 11 keywords (8.1%) | 126 keywords (88.1%) |
| People Also Ask | 128 keywords (94.8%) | 143 keywords (100%) |
| Image pack | 105 keywords (77.8%) | 2 keywords (1.4%) |
| Reviews | 94 keywords (69.6%) | 2 keywords (1.4%) |
| Local pack | 33 keywords (24.4%) | 1 keyword (0.7%) |
| Paid ads | 1 keyword (0.7%) | 21 keywords (14.7%) |
Same search engine, same country, same week. On one project the AI Overview appears on one keyword in twelve, on the other on nine keywords in ten. A checklist that prescribes the same AI work for both is guessing on one of them.
Market-wide numbers help frame the swing without settling it. The Semrush study of more than 10 million keywords records AI Overviews on 6.49% of queries in January 2025, 24.61% in July and 15.69% in November. The study doesn't state which market it measured, so it works as an order of magnitude and not as a figure for your country: one more reason to measure your own SERPs instead of applying a percentage read somewhere else.
So the check to add to the quarterly cadence is just one: open the twenty queries that matter most and look at what sits above the organic results. If there is no AI Overview, the dedicated checks move to the next quarter. If there is one on nine queries out of ten, they become the quarter's priority.
The first thirty days, in order
If you are starting from scratch, you don't tackle all five cadences at once. This is the sequence we use on new projects.
- Week 1, the setup. Search Console and Analytics connected, robots.txt read line by line, sitemap submitted, HTTPS checked across the whole domain.
- Week 2, the twenty queries that matter. Search Console queries report, filter on positions 8-20, list of pages to fix in order of volume.
- Week 3, the pages that bring in leads. Title, meta description, intent and internal links on service pages and product pages, before the blog.
- Week 4, the technical blockers. Coverage errors, Core Web Vitals on field data, duplicate content, redirect chains.
Some context on where the average UK business starts from: according to the ONS analysis of AI in UK businesses (Business Insights and Conditions Survey, June 2026), around 35% of businesses with ten or more employees use at least one AI technology, 49% among those with 250 or more and 28% among the smallest ones. Adoption is growing fast, it was around 12% in late 2023, but for most businesses the week-one checks are still not a given.
What the cadence produces, rather than the number of items on the list, shows over the long run. In the Macropix case, a Milan-based LED screen manufacturer, the keyword "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising monitor) went from position 88 to 2, and in July 2026 the domain holds a 25.55% share of voice on the LED wall cluster, ahead of Amazon at 18.08% (source: Semrush). That is years of repeated checks, not thirty days. Our other projects are collected on the projects page, and if the monthly part has no internal owner we can talk about it starting from our SEO services.
Something the industry rarely says: the value of a checklist isn't in the checks it contains, it's in the ones it lets you skip this month. A sixty-item list with no cadences next to it produces two behaviours, both wrong: you run through all of it once and never again, or you never open it at all. With the cadences written down, the items to look at today are six or seven. Those get done.
SEO checklist FAQs
It is the list of checks a website needs so that Google and AI assistants can read it, understand it and show it to the people searching. It covers four areas: technical setup, optimisation of individual pages, off-site signals and results monitoring.
You don't run it in full. Setup is done once, on-page checks are repeated for every page you publish, Search Console monitoring is monthly and takes about an hour, the technical side is quarterly and the site architecture is reviewed once a year.
Connecting Search Console and Google Analytics, the robots.txt file and the XML sitemap. Without these three you have no way of knowing whether the rest of the work is paying off. Only then does it make sense to move on to titles, meta descriptions and content.
According to Google's documentation, no: there are no additional requirements and no special files or markup needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. What changes from one site to another is how often the AI Overview actually appears in your sector's SERPs, and that needs measuring on your own queries before deciding whether it is a priority.
The versions in circulation range from 27 to 60 points, but the number matters little. What matters is that every item has written next to it how often it is redone and who does it, otherwise the list gets run once and then stays closed.
