Find out why AI assistants skip your website
An AI SEO audit shows how ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini see your business today — and gives you a plain-English plan to be found and recommended. See where you stand in 30 seconds.
What is an AI SEO audit?
An AI SEO audit checks how well your website is set up to be found and recommended by AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews — as well as by traditional search. It looks at three things: whether AI can technically read your site, whether your content gives AI what it needs to understand and quote you, and whether the assistants actually name your business when customers ask for what you sell. AI My Site scores all three — Technical Health, AI Readiness and AI Visibility — then hands you a prioritised, plain-English plan with a step-by-step guide for your platform.
What an AI SEO audit checks
Three scores, each measuring something different. Here’s exactly what goes into each one — no vanity metrics, no black box.
Technical Health
Can search engines and AI crawlers reach, read and index your pages at all?
- Crawlability and indexing — anything quietly blocking your pages from being seen
- robots.txt and AI-crawler access (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and the rest)
- XML sitemap present and valid
- Canonical tags and duplicate-URL signals
- Title tags and meta descriptions — present, unique, well-formed
- Structured data (Schema.org / JSON-LD) present and valid
- Whether your content is readable without JavaScript
AI Readiness
How well your pages give an AI assistant what it needs to understand and quote you — judged for ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
- Answer-first copy and FAQ / Q&A blocks that AI can lift cleanly
- Question-phrased headings that match how customers actually ask
- Clear, consistent facts about your business (what you do, where, for whom)
- Valid, relevant structured data on your key pages — not just the homepage
- Descriptive image alt text and media
- Depth across your important pages, not a thin homepage alone
AI Visibility
What the assistants actually say about you today — measured, not guessed.
- How clearly ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can describe your business from what they already know
- The real test: we ask each assistant a buyer’s question from your market — with no brand name in it — and record whether you’re named
- Which competitors get named instead, and what sources get cited
- Tracked over time so you can see it move (or not) after you make changes
A note on honesty: the two on-page scores are judged against a fixed rubric, so small moves of a few points between scans are normal — we only flag a change when it clears that noise. And AI Visibility measures whether assistants can describe and name you, not a guaranteed ranking. No honest audit can promise you a spot.
How to run an AI SEO audit on your own site
You can check the essentials by hand in under an hour. Here’s the same order we check them in.
- 1
Ask the AI a real buyer’s question
Open ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini and ask each the question a customer would — “best [what you do] in [your town]”, without naming your business. Note whether you’re mentioned, and which competitors are. This is the truest test of AI visibility, and it costs nothing.
- 2
Check your title and meta description
View your page source (right-click → View Page Source) and find the <title> tag and <meta name="description">. Every important page should have a unique, specific title and a description that reads like a real answer, not keyword soup.
- 3
Check the AI crawlers can get in
Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt. Make sure you’re not accidentally blocking the AI answer bots — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Google-Extended and PerplexityBot. Blocking the wrong one quietly makes you invisible to that assistant.
- 4
Check your content is readable without JavaScript
Some AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript. In your browser, disable JavaScript and reload a key page (or use a “view rendered source” tool). If your main text disappears, assistants may not see it either.
- 5
Check your structured data
Run a key page through Google’s Rich Results Test. Clear, valid Schema.org markup (your business, address, products, FAQs) hands AI clean facts to quote — it’s a helper, not a magic switch, but it removes ambiguity.
- 6
Write answer-first, and state your facts plainly
Lead each page with a direct, quotable answer to the question it targets, add an FAQ in real customer language, and make sure your core facts — what you do, where, for whom, opening hours, prices — are stated clearly and consistently across the site.
That’s the manual version. AI My Site does all of this in one scan — across all your pages and all three assistants — then ranks every fix and keeps checking as things change.
Run my free mini scan →The fixes differ by platform
The principles are universal; where you click isn’t. Start with your platform.
On Squarespace or GoDaddy? See the full guide library. New to the terms? The AI search glossary explains them in plain English.
AI SEO audit — common questions
What is an AI SEO audit?
An AI SEO audit checks how well a website is set up to be found and recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews — as well as by traditional search. It looks at three things: whether AI can technically read your site, whether your content gives AI what it needs to understand and quote you, and whether the assistants actually mention your business when customers ask.
Is an AI SEO audit different from a normal SEO audit?
It overlaps but goes further. A traditional SEO audit focuses on ranking in a list of blue links. An AI SEO audit adds the questions that decide whether an assistant names you in a written answer: is your content answer-first and easy to quote, are your business facts clear and consistent, and do the AI crawlers have access. The technical foundations are largely shared; the emphasis on being cited (not just ranked) is what’s new.
Can I get a free AI SEO audit?
You can run a free 30-second mini scan that asks ChatGPT a real buyer’s question about your market and tells you whether it names your business, plus one fix to act on. The full three-score audit and prioritised action plan come with a subscription — a mini scan is a taster, not the full report.
How long until AI assistants start recommending my site?
Honestly, weeks to a few months. Search engines and AI assistants need time to re-crawl and re-evaluate your site, and being named for questions that don’t mention you by name depends on signals from across the web, not just your own pages. Anyone promising overnight results — or guaranteed rankings — is overpromising.
Do I need technical skills to fix what the audit finds?
No. Every fix is written in plain English and ranked so you start with what matters most, and each one links to a step-by-step guide for your platform — Wix, Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace or GoDaddy — with exact menu locations. On the One Site plan, we make the approved changes for you.
Which platforms does this work for?
Any website. We have platform-specific audit pages and step-by-step guides for WordPress, Shopify and Wix, plus Squarespace and GoDaddy, because the fixes differ by platform even when the principles are the same.