Playbook
The Pre-Publish Checklist for an Insurance Website
Nothing ships until every box is ticked. You do not need to understand every line to use it, because an AI coding assistant can turn this page into a tool that checks your own site.
11 min read
This is the gate, not a theory of search. A page that fails a critical line does not get published, however good the writing is. Four pillars carry most of the weight: the page says what it is, the page answers questions, the page shows its sources, and the site is legible to an agent. Then compliance, accessibility and speed. The last section covers the trap that fools experienced marketers, which is a perfect speed score on a page that rendered nothing.
How to use this without understanding it
Most of the items below are technical. You do not need to be able to write any of them. Open an AI coding assistant in your project, give it this page, and ask it to build you a script that checks your own site against every item and reports what fails. That works, it takes about a minute, and the result is a tool you own rather than a report someone sells you.
What follows is the list we run internally before anything is published. It is ordered by how much damage the item does when it is missing.
The page says what it is
- Article or WebPage schema in the head, with a published date and a modified date that are both true.
- The author is an organization, a named desk with a real About page behind it, not a single person. On regulated subjects, institutional accountability is the stronger signal.
- The page title and the H1 make the same promise. Identical wording apart from a brand suffix. A title that claims something the H1 does not deliver is a trust penalty.
- One H1, then a logical heading structure underneath. Headings are structure, not font sizes.
The page answers questions
- FAQPage schema with three to five pairs, each phrased the way a person actually asks it out loud.
- Every answer is complete within its first two sentences. Assume the passage gets quoted alone, with none of the page around it.
- The questions are unique to this page. The same five questions copied across forty location pages is detectable, and it is treated as what it is.
The page shows its sources
- Dataset schema wrapping any government or authoritative data the page cites.
- The creator URL is the exact endpoint the data came from, not the agency home page. This is the line most sites get wrong, and it is the one that separates a sourced page from a page that merely mentions a source.
- Plan counts, premiums, star ratings and enrollment figures carry a date and a source in the visible copy, not only in the markup.
The site is usable by an agent
- A valid llms.txt at the site root: the site name, a one line summary, then sections of labelled links.
- Your robots.txt and your firewall do not turn away AI crawlers. Check the named agents from the major assistants one by one. Security plugins and content delivery network bot rules block these by default more often than anyone expects, and nothing on your site shows an error when they do.
- If the site has a real tool, a quoter or a plan finder or a subsidy estimator, it is exposed so an agent can call it rather than only read about it.
Compliance and trust
- The required disclaimer stating you are not connected with the federal government, where it applies.
- Your producer number is shown, and any carrier count statement is accurate and current.
- The privacy policy discloses third party data sharing in plain words a client could actually follow.
- On Medicare, ACA and health coverage pages: no client side analytics or advertising pixel fires before consent. On pages that collect health information this is a liability question, not a marketing preference.
Accessibility and speed
- Text sizing, contrast and a readable typeface. A large share of this audience is over sixty five.
- Visible keyboard focus, sufficient contrast, and reduced motion respected.
- Mobile performance score of 90 or better, checked on the mobile tab of the live URL. Not desktop, not a staging preview.
- The layout does not jump while loading. Fonts are served from your own domain. Tracking loads after the page paints.
The perfect score that means nothing
This is the part that costs real money, and it fools people who have been doing this a long time. A performance score of 100 is more often a broken page than a fast one.
If the page redirected, or the mobile version rendered an empty hero, or the build shipped without its stylesheet, then the test measured a page with nothing on it. Nothing loads very quickly. You get a beautiful score on a page your client sees as a white screen.
So do not stop at the number. Scroll down in the report to the screenshot of what actually loaded. If it looks like your website, the score is real. If it is blank, nearly blank, or a login screen, the score is a lie and your problem is worse than slow. As a rule of thumb from measuring a lot of these, a fully rendered mobile screenshot of an agency home page comes back around 17 to 31 kilobytes. Under 10 kilobytes is usually a blank page wearing a good score.
Ship
- The build is green with no console errors.
- Deployed, and the live URL re-checked, not the preview.
- Submitted for indexing, and linked from somewhere real on your own site so it is not an orphan.
Questions agencies ask
What should I check before publishing an insurance web page?
Four things carry most of the weight: page schema with an organization author, a FAQPage block of real questions answered in the first two sentences, Dataset schema crediting the exact endpoint any government figures came from, and an llms.txt at the site root with AI crawlers unblocked. Then compliance disclaimers, accessibility, and a mobile performance score of 90 or better on the live URL.
What is llms.txt?
A plain text file at the root of a website that states what the site is and points to its most useful pages, written for a reader rather than a crawler. No major assistant has committed to reading it, so it is a cheap hedge rather than a requirement, and very few insurance sites serve one.
Why should the author be an organization instead of a person?
On regulated subjects such as Medicare, health coverage and finance, accountability sits with the business rather than an individual writer. Publishing under a named desk with a real About page behind it is the stronger signal, and it survives staff changes.
Why can a perfect performance score be a bad sign?
Because a page that redirected, rendered an empty hero, or shipped without its stylesheet has almost nothing to load, and nothing loads very fast. Check the screenshot in the report. A fully rendered mobile agency home page is roughly 17 to 31 kilobytes, and under 10 usually means the page came back blank.
Talk it through
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