Is your website ready for AI search? 7 checks

More and more people ask an AI tool before they search, or instead of searching. “Who is a good dentist in Noida?” “Which forex card is best for students?” The answer they get often names a few businesses and links to a few sources.

You cannot control what AI tools say. You can make your site easy for them to reach, understand and trust. Here are the seven checks I run.

1. Can AI crawlers reach your site?

AI tools use their own crawlers, such as OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), PerplexityBot and Googlebot (which feeds AI Overviews). Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and check that they are not blocked. Also check that your firewall or security plugin is not blocking them.

2. Is your content in the raw HTML?

Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. If your main text only appears after scripts run, they may see an empty page. Right-click, choose View page source and search for a sentence from your content. If it is not there, read my note on JavaScript SEO.

3. Do your pages answer first?

AI tools look for clear, quotable answers. Put the direct answer to the main question in the first one or two sentences of a page or section, then explain. “We move homes across Delhi NCR, usually within 48 hours of booking” is easier to cite than three paragraphs about your passion for service.

4. Do you have real FAQs?

Write down the questions customers actually ask you on the phone or WhatsApp. Answer each one in two to four plain sentences on the relevant page. These match the way people phrase questions to AI tools.

5. Is your business described the same way everywhere?

AI tools build a picture of your business (an “entity”) from many sources: your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories and reviews. If your name, address, services and description differ from place to place, the picture gets blurry. Make them consistent.

6. Do you have structured data?

Schema markup labels facts on your pages in a format machines read easily: who you are, what services you offer, your FAQs, your articles and their authors. Add Organization or LocalBusiness, Person, Service, FAQPage and Article schema where they apply, and test them with Google’s Rich Results Test.

7. Are you measuring AI visibility?

Pick 10 to 20 real questions your customers ask. Ask them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google every month, and note whether you are mentioned or linked. In Google Analytics, look for referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com.

What not to do

• Do not write for robots. Pages stuffed with question phrases read badly and convince no one, human or AI.
• Do not block every AI bot by default. Some security plugins do this. Decide on purpose which tools you want to allow.
• Do not chase one prompt. AI answers change from day to day. Look at the trend across many questions over months.
• Do not forget the basics. AI tools lean heavily on pages that already rank well in normal search. Good SEO comes first.

A bonus: llms.txt

An llms.txt file is a short plain-text summary of your site and its key pages, placed at yourdomain.com/llms.txt. It is a new, informal standard, and not every AI tool uses it yet. It is quick to create, so it is worth adding.

How to check this on your site

1. Open your robots.txt and look for Disallow rules that apply to GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or all bots (User-agent: *).
2. View the page source of your three most important pages and confirm the main text is there.
3. Read the first two sentences of each of those pages. Do they answer the main question directly?
4. Paste a key page into Google’s Rich Results Test and see which structured data it finds.
5. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity “Who offers [your service] in [your city]?” and note who they mention.
6. Download the free AI Search Readiness Checklist and work through it.

If you would like help with any of these, my AEO and GEO service covers all seven checks, and measures the results.