Monitoring: SEO is a loop, not a launch task

Everything above decays without monitoring. The minimal setup:

Google Search Console — submit the sitemap, then check weekly: Pages (indexed vs excluded and why), Core Web Vitals, and Performance for query trends. "Crawled — currently not indexed" on important pages is your earliest quality warning.
Bing Webmaster Tools — five minutes to set up; Bing also feeds ChatGPT's browsing.
Lighthouse CI in the pipeline — performance budgets fail the build before a regression ships.
Log AI crawler visits — grep your access logs (or edge analytics) for GPTBot|ClaudeBot|PerplexityBot to see whether the AEO work is being consumed.
After every release that touches routing: spot-check curl -I on a few key URLs (status, canonical, cache headers).

Checklist:

Everything above decays without monitoring. The minimal setup:

Google Search Console — submit the sitemap, then check weekly: Pages (indexed vs excluded and why), Core Web Vitals, and Performance for query trends. "Crawled — currently not indexed" on important pages is your earliest quality warning.
Bing Webmaster Tools — five minutes to set up; Bing also feeds ChatGPT's browsing.
Lighthouse CI in the pipeline — performance budgets fail the build before a regression ships.
Log AI crawler visits — grep your access logs (or edge analytics) for GPTBot|ClaudeBot|PerplexityBot to see whether the AEO work is being consumed.
After every release that touches routing: spot-check curl -I on a few key URLs (status, canonical, cache headers).

Checklist:

All topics in this guide