A site audit for AI search: the checks that matter and how to fix them

Why a normal SEO audit isn’t enough

Classic audits were built for Google’s ten blue links. Much of that still matters. AI assistants add a few needs of their own: they often don’t run JavaScript, they lean on structured data to get facts right, and several use their own crawlers that your website may be blocking without you knowing.

The five areas

1. Technical basics

Secure address, a title and description on every page, one main heading, a sitemap, links that work, a mobile viewport. Boring, and still the foundation: a page a search engine can’t list is a page an AI is unlikely to cite.

2. AI readiness

• Crawler access: does your robots.txt block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or others? Some hosts and security plugins add these blocks by default.
• Readable without JavaScript: is what you do, where and for whom in the page’s HTML?
• Business details in structured data: name, address, phone and hours in a form machines read exactly. (You can make this code with our free tool.)
• An About page and questions and answers: AI uses these to judge whether you’re a real, established business and to quote you.
• Links to your profiles on Google, Facebook, Yelp and others, so the assistant can connect them to you.

3. Local

Tap-to-call number, address or service area, opening hours, a map link, reviews, and your city in the home page title or heading. An assistant answering “best plumber in Round Rock” needs to be sure you’re in Round Rock.

4. Speed

How long the home page takes to arrive, how heavy it is, how many scripts hold it up, and whether images load only when needed. We measure from our server, so a visitor’s phone may be slower.

5. Conversion

A contact or quote form, one clear button near the top, a phone number on the home page, proof from customers. Winning the recommendation is wasted if the visitor can’t work out how to reach you.

What you get

One score out of 100, a score for each area, and a short Fix these first list ordered by how much each change helps. Every item says what we found and how to fix it in plain English. Everything else, including what already passed and the pages we read, sits in pull-downs so the page stays simple. Run it again after making changes and it shows how much the score moved.

What it can’t tell you

It’s a check of what can be verified from your pages’ code. It isn’t a guarantee of rankings or of AI recommendations, and no audit is. To see whether assistants actually recommend you, use AI visibility. To see whether those recommendations become customers, that’s attribution, which is the main job of Which AI Sent.

How to run it

In your dashboard, open Tools → Site audit and click Run my first audit. It reads your home page and up to eight more pages. Want to know how you stack up? Run the same checks on a competitor.