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AI Overviews · § 1.3.6 · Reference
Squarespace AI Overviews Checklist
Eighteen items in five groups — Crawlers, Schema, Content, Authority, Measurement — each copy-paste codable from a Squarespace 7.1 site. Ship one group per session and the whole list takes about two focused hours. The checklist is the operational version of the five-step install the cluster hub walks through in narrative form.
This is the reference page, not the explainer. Each item is one action with a verification step. The leaves linked from each group cover the why and the how in depth; this page is the do-it list you keep open while you work.
§01How to use
How to use this checklist
Work through the groups in order. Crawlers first because nothing else matters if Googlebot cannot reach the page. Schema second because it is the foundation everything compounds on. Content third because that is where the most labour lives. Authority fourth because the entity wiring decides which of two equally good pages gets cited. Measurement fifth because it is the loop that tells you whether the first four are working. Each item has a verification step. Tick an item only when the verification passes.
The checklist assumes Business plan or above. The Code Injection items (Article schema, Person schema, the heading hierarchy patch) require it. On Personal plan, the content, authority-side-of-the-house, and measurement groups still work; the schema group is the gap that cannot be closed inside Squarespace at that tier.
§02Crawlers
Group 1 — Crawlers (3 items)
The three crawler-layer items are the cheapest wins in the whole list. Total time on a Squarespace site is about five minutes including verification. AIO depends on Googlebot reaching the page, which depends on the search-engine checkbox in Settings > Crawlers rather than the AI exclusion checkbox below it. Confirm both are in the right state; the search-engine checkbox should be on, the AI checkbox is owner preference but does not affect AIO either way.
01. Search-engine checkbox is on. Settings → Crawlers → "Allow search engines to crawl my site" should be on. Verify: open robots.txt and confirm there is no User-agent: Googlebot followed by Disallow: /.
02. Googlebot reaches your top page. Run a curl test with the Googlebot user-agent. Verify: HTTP 200 OK response.
03. AI exclusion checkbox state is intentional. Settings → Crawlers → "Block known artificial intelligence crawlers" state is owner choice; it has no effect on AIO eligibility because it does not control Googlebot. Verify: note the state; revisit during the broader AI Crawlers cluster audit.
§03Schema
Group 2 — Schema (4 items)
The schema-layer items require Code Injection on Business plan or above. Total time on a fresh site is about thirty minutes including JSON-LD authoring and validation. Article schema goes on every editorial page; Person schema goes on /founder/; Organization schema goes on the homepage. FAQ schema gets a discipline pass after the May 2026 deprecation — kept on dedicated FAQ pages only, removed from service pages and blog posts.
04. Article JSON-LD on every editorial page. Inject Article with headline, datePublished, dateModified, author (Person, URL pointing to /founder/), publisher (Organization). Verify: Rich Results Test passes with zero errors.
05. Person JSON-LD on /founder/. Name, jobTitle, url, image, knowsAbout array, sameAs array of verifiable third-party profiles. The production block is in the E-E-A-T leaf. Verify: Rich Results Test passes.
06. Organization JSON-LD on /. Name, url, logo, sameAs to brand social profiles. Verify: Rich Results Test passes.
07. FAQ schema discipline pass. Audit every page for FAQPage JSON-LD1. Keep it only on dedicated FAQ pages. Remove it from service pages, blog posts, and product pages. Verify: grep your site for "@type": "FAQPage"; expect matches only on FAQ-primary pages.
§04Content
Group 3 — Content (5 items)
The content-layer items are the largest time investment. Per-page, the rewrite to add the 134-167 word opening passage, the H2-level passage shape under every section, and the clean heading hierarchy takes about an hour. Prioritise your top five trafficked editorial pages and your homepage; sweep the rest over time. The work is durable — pages restructured for AIO citation also rank better in classical Search and improve ChatGPT citation rates.
08. One H1 per page. Audit each citation-target page; re-tag stray H1 blocks as H2. Use the Code Injection patch on collection index pages where the editor will not let you re-tag. Verify: view source and count H1 elements; expect exactly one.
09. 134-167 word bolded lead at the top. The first 200 words of every page answer the page's primary query directly. Bold the answer3. Verify: read the first 200 words; the question should be answered without scrolling.
10. Same passage shape under every H2. Each section opens with a bolded self-contained answer to that section's sub-question. Verify: read the opening sentence of every H2 section; each should hold up alone.
11. 2+ named sources per editorial page. Replace vague attribution with publisher + date inline. Verify: count named publishers; should be 2 or more.
12. 1+ specific statistic per major section. Replace adjectives with numbers where you have them; cite the source. Verify: grep your top pages for numerical claims; each should have an adjacent citation.
§05Authority
Group 4 — Authority (3 items)
The authority items live mostly outside the site. AI Overviews validates entities by checking whether the same person, with the same credentials, appears on independent third-party sources. The on-site implementation is the sameAs array on the Person JSON-LD. The off-site work is earning those mentions in the first place — LinkedIn presence, podcast appearances, conference talks, named quotes in industry publications. Each new third-party mention adds a URL to the sameAs array and strengthens the entity over time.
13. Founder Person sameAs has 4+ verified profiles. LinkedIn at minimum; ideally GitHub or a portfolio site, plus two more. The E-E-A-T leaf covers the production block. Verify: click each URL in the sameAs array; each should resolve to a public profile of the named founder.
14. Trust signals visible on the site. Real email on the contact page (not just a form). Real privacy policy and terms. HTTPS sitewide. Per Google's quality rater guidelines2, Trust is the most important page-quality indicator. Verify: click through the contact, privacy, and terms pages; each should be real, not placeholder.
15. First-hand experience visible in body copy. Verifiable specifics — years of experience, number of projects, named clients where confidentiality allows. Verify: read the founder page with the bio hidden; the verifiable detail should tell a story without the bio paragraph.
§06Measurement
Group 5 — Measurement (3 items)
The measurement-layer items close the loop. Without them you ship optimisations into the dark; with them you see what is working. AIO is the easiest AI surface to measure because citation cards carry referrer data — clicks from AIO appear in Search Console under the standard Search performance report. Pair that with a weekly manual query log to confirm appearance on target queries, and the loop is complete.
16. Google Search Console verified, Performance report monitored weekly. The page-level position data is the foundation. Verify: Search Console shows query-level impressions and average position for at least 10 target queries.
17. Weekly manual AIO query log. 10-15 priority queries logged each Friday with citation appearance Y/N and a screenshot. Verify: the sheet has at least four weeks of data.
18. Squarespace AI Visibility tool populated. Add 5-10 branded and 5-10 non-branded prompts in the SEO panel5. Plan-dependent cadence: every 14 days on Core/Business, every 7 on Plus and above. Verify: the panel shows a result for each prompt.
What done looks like
0
Rich Results Test errors across Article, Person, and Organization blocks site-wide.
