The AIO baseline every new site should ship with
Nine things that cost nothing extra at build time and are expensive to retrofit. If you are launching a site this month, this is the checklist.
Retrofitting structure onto a finished site is more expensive than building it in. Every item below takes minutes during a build and hours afterward, because afterward means touching every page.
This is the baseline we ship on every Deadset Labs build, including the fast ones.
The checklist
- 01One H1 per page that names the actual subject, and a heading hierarchy that would make sense read aloud.
- 02A unique title and meta description per page. Not one site-wide pair repeated everywhere.
- 03A self-referencing canonical tag on every page, pointed at the page itself.
- 04A schema graph: Organization or ProfessionalService site-wide, Service per offering, Breadcrumb on deep pages.
- 05A real sitemap.xml that is generated from the routes, not hand-maintained until it rots.
- 06robots.txt that explicitly allows GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended.
- 07llms.txt — a plain-text summary of who you are, what you sell, what it costs, and where the key pages live.
- 08An FAQ section written as direct question-and-answer pairs, because that is the easiest thing on earth for a model to quote.
- 09Analytics and Search Console connected before launch, so you have baseline data instead of starting from zero in month three.
What this is not
It is not a content strategy. It will not make a thin site rank against a deep one. What it does is remove every structural reason a search engine or assistant would fail to understand you — so the content you do publish counts for its full value.
Most sites we audit fail six of these nine. Fixing them is the cheapest visibility work available.