How to check if your website is ready for AI search and assistants

By the PostCliq team at WP Creative, Sydney

More buyers now start their research by asking an AI assistant or reading an AI summary at the top of a search page. "Who does commercial cleaning in Parramatta?" or "What should I look for in an IT support provider?" can get a written answer, often with a handful of sources linked underneath.

You can't control whether an assistant mentions your business. Answers change from day to day and from person to person. What you can control is whether your website is readable by these tools in the first place. If a crawler is blocked, or your key facts are buried in an image, you've taken yourself out of the running before anything else matters.

This guide covers readiness: can AI search reach, read and quote your site? It's a practical check you can do yourself.

Step 1: Check who your robots.txt lets in

Every site has (or should have) a file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. It tells crawlers which parts of the site they may visit. Open yours and read it.

The thing to understand is that the big AI companies run more than one crawler. Broadly:

• Training crawlers collect content that may be used to train models.
• Search and retrieval crawlers fetch pages so an assistant can answer a question and cite a source.

Blocking a training crawler is a reasonable policy choice that many businesses make. Blocking a search crawler is different: it can quietly remove you from that tool's answers. Check each vendor's current documentation for the names of their crawlers, since they change, and make sure your rules match what you actually intend.

Also check:

• that a security plugin, firewall or CDN isn't blocking bots your robots.txt allows
• that important pages aren't marked "noindex" by accident, which often happens after a site rebuild
• that your XML sitemap exists, lists your key pages and is referenced in robots.txt

Step 2: Make sure you're in the ordinary search indexes

AI search features lean heavily on traditional search indexes. Google has said that a page that's indexed and eligible to show a snippet can appear in its AI features, and some other assistants draw on Bing's results. So the basics still matter.

Set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools if you haven't, submit your sitemap to both, and check the indexing reports for important pages that are "discovered but not indexed" or excluded. If a key service page isn't in the index, fixing that comes before anything AI-specific.

Step 3: Structure each page so a passage can be quoted

AI tools tend to lift short passages: an opening summary, a direct answer under a clear heading, a row from a table. Pages written as one long wall of text, or built from sliders and tabs, are harder to quote.

For your most important pages, check that:

• there's one clear main heading (H1) that says what the page is about
• subheadings follow in order and many are phrased the way a buyer would ask, such as "How much does a fit-out cost?" or "How long does it take?"
• the main answer appears near the top, in plain sentences, not after three paragraphs of scene-setting
• comparisons and specifications sit in real HTML tables, not screenshots

None of this is new. It's good writing for people, and it happens to suit machines too.

Step 4: Put the facts in text, not pictures

A surprising number of business websites hold their most important facts in images: a price list as a JPG, service areas on a map graphic, credentials in a logo strip. People can read them, but a crawler often can't, and an assistant can't quote what it can't read.

Go through the questions a buyer would ask before contacting you: what you do, where, for whom, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, and how to get started. Then check that each answer appears on your site as plain text, ideally on the page where someone would look for it. If the answer isn't on the site at all, no amount of technical work will get you cited for it.

Step 5: Check your structured data agrees with the page

Structured data (schema markup) is code that describes your business and pages in a machine-readable way: your organisation name, address, logo, FAQs and so on. It can help, but only if it's accurate.

Run your key pages through Google's Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator and look for:

• errors and warnings
• details that contradict the visible page, such as an old address, a different phone number or a logo URL that no longer loads
• the same facts described differently on different pages

Contradictions are worse than missing markup, because they give tools two versions of the truth to choose from.

Step 6: Keep your facts consistent off the site

Assistants also learn about a business from other places: directory listings, review sites, industry associations and press. If your business name, description and address differ across those sources, the picture an assistant builds of you will be blurry.

Pick one short, accurate description of your business and use it everywhere you have a profile. Correct old listings that are wrong. Don't invent claims to look bigger. Stick to facts you'd be happy to defend.

Step 7: Test it by hand, and keep the results in perspective

Once the groundwork is done, ask a few AI assistants the questions your buyers would ask, and note whether your business or pages come up and which sources get cited. Do it every month or so with the same questions, so you're comparing like with like.

Keep it in perspective. A single answer on a single day tells you very little, and anyone offering a precise "share of voice" figure for AI assistants should explain exactly how they measured it. Readiness is something you can fix and check. Mentions are something you influence over time.

A free way to run the readiness checks

PostCliq, the free website audit we built at WP Creative, includes AI readiness as one of its seven scored categories. It reads your robots.txt and reports crawler by crawler whether search and retrieval bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google and Microsoft are allowed, keeping training crawlers separate. It also checks heading structure, whether the main answer sits near the top of the page, whether key facts are in text, and flags structured data that contradicts the page.

To be clear about its limits, these are readiness checks. They aren't a measurement of how often ChatGPT or any other assistant mentions your brand. The audit is free with no credit card, reads up to 50 public pages, and never changes anything on your site. The full list of what it does and doesn't do is on its official information page at postcliq.com/ai-information.

AI search is moving quickly, but the foundations aren't. Let the right crawlers in, write clear pages with the facts in plain text, and keep your story consistent everywhere it appears. That's what makes a website easy to quote.

PostCliq is built and operated by WP Creative, a web design and development agency in Sydney.

This article was first published on the PostCliq blog.