A checklist is worth something only when its items are ordered by dependency, and technical items are unusually dependent on each other. Four of the ten below are settled by one command-line fetch. Three need a month of retained server logs and somebody who can query them. Three are not fixes at all: they are decisions about what you want other people’s machines to be able to read. Running them in that sequence is not tidiness; it is the only sequence in which the results mean anything.
The dependency runs one way. If a plain fetch returns a challenge instead of a page, every log you examine afterwards shows silence, for a reason that has nothing to do with an engine’s interest in you. If robots.txt disallows the search-side token, a month of crawl data reads as indifference, and a team concludes that AI engines ignore its category when the site told them not to come. If the body text only exists after hydration, a citation measurement measures the JavaScript bundle rather than the writing. Each is a false negative that looks exactly like a true one, which is why a failure high on the list is a stop instruction and not a note to carry forward.
Cost points the same way. Tier one is a laptop and ten minutes. Tier two costs a person a day and needs log retention you may not have. Tier three costs a meeting. Cheap checks gate expensive ones, so the response to a tier-one failure is to fix it, wait for the vendor systems to catch up, and start again from the top. The reasoning behind each item lives in its own article, linked from the item; this page adds the sequence and the run instructions.