An on-page SEO checklist is only useful if you can run it on one page and get a clear pass or fail for each line. Nathan Gotch recently ran his 14 checks live on a local service page that failed almost all of them. I run Distribb, and I turned his walkthrough into the steps below, with how to run each check by hand. At the end I show which parts Distribb does for you.
We analyzed 5 on-page SEO checklist pages against 6 pre-publish checks and found that 0 of the 5 mention robots.txt or noindex. None covers HTML versus JavaScript content, the 2 MB Googlebot limit, junk form testing or AI crawler retrieval.
The on-page SEO checklist at a glance
Gotch's point is that the on-page work that ranks a page in Google is the same work that gets it used in AI answers. He orders the checks from "can it be found" to "can it convert". Run them top to bottom and stop to fix anything that fails in the first four, because nothing below matters if the page cannot be read.
| # | Check | Passes when |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Crawlable | robots.txt lets search and AI bots reach the page |
| 2 | Indexable | No noindex tag on a page you want found |
| 3 | Retrievable | An AI chat can read and describe the page; it responds quickly and stays under 2 MB |
| 4 | HTML | The main text is in the page source, in normal tags |
| 5 | Fast enough | Speed is average or better |
| 6 | Matches intent | The page type fits what the searcher wants |
| 7 | Built for users | A visitor can do what the page asks them to do |
| 8 | Relevant | A visitor knows instantly they are in the right place |
| 9 | Topic placement | Topic in URL, title, meta, H1, first 100 words, a variant in an H2; H1 comes first |
| 10 | Unique | At least 20% of the page exists nowhere else |
| 11 | Experience | The page proves the business knows its work |
| 12 | Quality | Specific, accurate, better than what ranks |
| 13 | Design | Someone clearly invested in how it looks and reads |
| 14 | Goal completion | The visitor can finish the action: call, book, submit |
His example page throughout is a heater repair page for Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis. Keep it in mind as you read: a local service page that should produce leads.
Step 1: Make sure Google can crawl and index the page
Check 1, crawlable. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read it. Look for any Disallow line that covers the page's path, and for rules aimed at specific bots, including AI crawlers. If you do not want to read it by hand, our free robots.txt checker tells you whether a URL is blocked.
Check 2, indexable. Open the page, view the source and search for "noindex". Gotch's example page passed check 1 and failed check 2: it carried a noindex tag, which asks search engines not to index it. Google sometimes ignores that tag, but do not count on it. Remove it from any page you want found.
One odd detail from the video: a page with noindex can still be read and cited by AI tools. That does not make it a strategy. Search results are one of the main sources AI tools pull from, so being indexed still raises your odds.
Milestone: the page is allowed in robots.txt and has no noindex tag.
Step 2: Confirm AI tools can read it
Check 3, retrievable. Gotch's test: open ChatGPT in a temporary chat with personalization off, paste the URL and ask it to review the page. If it describes what is on the page, some route to the content exists. He is careful about what this proves. It may be reading a cached or archived copy, so it shows the content is reachable, not that the live page was fetched directly.
Two more things belong in this check:
- Response time. His example responded slowly, and he treats a slow server response as a risk for AI retrieval in particular.
- Page size. Keep the HTML under 2 MB. Google changed its Googlebot documentation in February 2026 to say it fetches the first 2 MB of an HTML file. Very few pages come close, but a page full of inline images or scripts can.
Our free Googlebot simulator fetches a URL the way Googlebot does and shows the status code, robots directives, canonical, headings and the visible text, so you can run checks 1 to 4 in one place.
Milestone: an AI chat can describe the page correctly, and the HTML is well under 2 MB.
Step 3: Check that the content is in the HTML
Check 4, HTML. Copy a sentence from the middle of the page, open view-source and search for it. You want to find it inside normal tags like paragraphs and headings. If it is not in the source and only appears after JavaScript runs, crawlers and AI tools may never see it.
Gotch is firm on this one. AI tools handle plain HTML far better than content built in the browser.
Milestone: the main text, headings and calls to action all appear in the page source.
Step 4: Treat speed as a pass or fail
Check 5, fast enough. Run the URL through Google PageSpeed Insights. His example scored about 71 on mobile and 98 on desktop, and he passed it.
His reasoning: speed helps a lot when you go from terrible to average, and very little after that. Shaving points off an average page is time you should spend on the checks below. Fix speed when it is bad. Do not chase a perfect score.
Milestone: no red scores; anything average or above is a pass.
Step 5: Match the intent and build for the visitor
Check 6, matches intent. Search the page's topic and look at what ranks. Someone searching "heater repair Webster Groves" wants a repair, maybe urgently in winter. That needs a page built to turn a visitor into a lead. Gotch's example read like an informational article, with general text about heating, so it failed. If you want the background, here is what search intent is and its four types.
Check 7, built for users. Read the page as a visitor. His example said "call today" with no phone number you could tap. Every instruction the page gives has to be something the visitor can actually do.
Milestone: the page type matches the top results, and every call to action works.
Step 6: Make the page obviously relevant
Check 8, relevant. A visitor should know within a moment that they are in the right place. The example page talked about heating repair and services but never mentioned Webster Groves or St. Louis. For a local page, that is a fail. Localize the headline, the intro and the proof.
Relevance is not only for search engines. A visitor who has to look at other pages of the site to work out where the business operates will leave.
Milestone: the service and the location are both in the first screen of the page.
Step 7: Put the topic in the important spots
Check 9, topic placement. Put the topic in six places:
- The URL
- The title tag
- The meta description
- The H1
- The first 100 words
- A close variant in one H2
The example missed the location in the title, the meta description and the URL. Gotch's test for the URL is useful on any site: read the slug alone, without the domain, and say what the page is about. "heating-repair" could be anywhere in the world. He would use a folder structure with the city inside the metro area, so the location is part of the address.
Then check the heading order. The example had three H2s, "contact us", "hours" and "payment accepted", coming from the navigation and sitting above the H1. The H1 should be the first heading on the page, and navigation labels should be plain text, not headings.
Milestone: the topic appears in all six places, and the H1 is the first heading in the source.
Step 8: Make it unique and show experience
Check 10, unique. Gotch's bar is at least 20% of the page that exists nowhere else, and he means unique to your business, not "written by a person". For a commercial page this is the easy part: your selling points, testimonials, proof, guarantees and real FAQs. If a generic AI prompt could produce the same page, it fails.
He makes a point I agree with. His example page was written by a human and was still generic. How a page was produced does not decide its quality. What it says does.
Check 11, experience. The page has to show the business knows its work. "Our dedicated contractors specialize in preventive care" proves nothing. Years in business, jobs done in that suburb, certifications, photos of real work and named reviews do.
Milestone: you can point to at least five lines that only your business could have written.
Step 9: Judge quality, design and the goal
Check 12, quality. Compare the page with the top three results honestly. If yours is thinner, vaguer or less useful, it fails.
Check 13, design. Gotch says almost nobody talks about this, and it matters. A page with clear sections, visual hierarchy and visible effort performs better than a wall of text.
Check 14, goal completion. The example had phone and contact elements around it, but no way to finish an action on the page itself. A lead page needs a form you can submit or a number you can tap, near the top.
Milestone: a visitor can complete the page's goal without leaving it.
Step 10: Stress-test the form before anything else
This was my favorite part of the video, and it comes before the on-page work when Gotch takes on a new client. He fills in the contact form with junk: a made-up throwaway email, a fake address, no phone. The example form accepted it.
Why it matters: if junk gets through, lead counts look like they are growing while real enquiries are flat. An agency can show inflated numbers without meaning to, and a business owner who says "the leads are bad" may be right. His guess is that most local businesses in any city would fail this test.
How to run it:
- Submit the form with a fake email from a throwaway domain.
- Leave the phone field empty, then try letters in it.
- Check whether the submission arrives and what it looks like.
- Add validation for every field the business needs, and test again.
Milestone: junk submissions are rejected, so every lead you count is real.
Step 11: Rebuild the page from what competitors cover
Once the checks are done, Gotch fixes one commercial page properly and uses it as the model for every other service page on the site. His order:
- Remove the noindex tag. It takes seconds.
- Build a knowledge base about the business. Services, areas, prices, proof, how they work. Without it, any rewrite stays generic.
- Collect the entities competitors cover. Open the pages that rank for your topic and list the things, terms and concepts they all mention. In the heater repair example, competitors talk about gas furnaces, so the page should too. This is the minimum to compete, not the goal.
- Outline from those entities, matched to the commercial intent.
- Write the page, then check it against the intent. He showed a general AI chat drifting off the lead-generation goal on its own. Read the draft as a visitor who needs a repair today.
When the commercial page is done, the writing checks in our SEO copywriting checklist cover the supporting articles you link to it.
Milestone: one rebuilt page that passes all 14 checks, used as the template for the rest.
Automate it with Distribb
Steps 7, 8 and 11 are where the hours go, and they repeat for every page you publish. For the articles around your service pages, Distribb does that part on its own:
- Topic placement (step 7). Every article is written against a researched keyword, with a full heading structure, a table of contents, a meta description and schema, so the basics are in place before it goes live.
- Intent and quality (steps 5 and 9). It reads your site first and writes against search intent and what your business actually does, instead of filling sections with invented claims.
- No pages fighting each other. Each new article is compared with what you already published, by meaning, so two posts never chase the same query.
- Internal links. Each article links into your existing pages where it fits, so your service pages get support instead of new posts landing as orphans.
- Publishing. It publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, Ghost, Wix, Framer, GoHighLevel, Notion or a webhook, on a calendar, with images and schema intact.
What it does not do: fix the phone link or the contact form on your service page. Steps 7 to 10 on commercial pages are still a job for whoever runs the site, and the free tools above make them quicker.
Pro is $97 a month for 30 articles. Accelerator is $495 a month for 90, with a human reviewing every piece and done-for-you distribution (see Distribb pricing). Details are on the Distribb AI content writer page.
Watch the video
Nathan Gotch's original runs about 23 minutes and goes through every check on the heater repair page, including the form test.
FAQ
What should be on an on-page SEO checklist?
Access first, then content, then conversion. Check that the page can be crawled and indexed, that AI tools can read it, that the text is in the HTML and the speed is acceptable. Then check intent, relevance, topic placement, uniqueness, experience, quality and design. Finish with whether a visitor can complete the page's goal.
Where should the keyword go on a page?
In six places: the URL, the title tag, the meta description, the H1, the first 100 words, and a close variant in one H2. Read the URL slug on its own and make sure it says what the page is about, including the location for a local page. The H1 should also be the first heading in the source.
Is on-page SEO different for AI search?
Mostly no. Nathan Gotch argues the same practices rank a page in Google and get it used in AI answers. The two additions are a retrieval check, where you ask an AI chat to describe the page, and keeping the server fast and the HTML small, since slow or heavy pages are harder to fetch.
How unique does a page need to be?
At least 20% of it should exist nowhere else, by Gotch's rule of thumb. For a service page that means your own selling points, testimonials, proof, guarantees and real questions from customers. Whether a person or an AI drafted it matters less than whether it says something only your business could say.
How often should I run an on-page check?
Run it before a page goes live and again whenever rankings or leads drop. For a site-wide review rather than one page, use a full SEO audit checklist with 42 checks, then come back to this list for the pages that matter most.
Run it on one page today
Take the page that should bring you the most leads, run the 14 checks, and fill in the form with junk to see what gets through. Fix what fails in that order. If you want the supporting articles written, linked and published around it without doing them by hand, start the free trial of the Distribb AI content writer.