What your homepage looks like to Google and AI crawlers: a 20-minute checklist
Your site can look great in a browser and still be half-invisible to search engines and AI assistants, because they read the code, not the pixels. Here's a quick pass you can do on any homepage. 1. The basics i
Your site can look great in a browser and still be half-invisible to search engines and AI assistants, because they read the code, not the pixels. Here's a quick pass you can do on any homepage.
1. The basics in <head>
- One unique
<title>(~50–60 chars) that says what you do and where. - A
<meta name="description">written for humans, since it's often your search snippet. -
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">. Without it, mobile rendering suffers. - Open Graph tags (
og:title,og:description,og:image) so shared links get a proper preview.
2. Structure
- Exactly one
<h1>, then headings in order. Crawlers use them to work out what the page is about. - Meaningful
alttext on images that carry information.
3. Discoverability
-
/robots.txtexists and doesn't accidentally block everything. -
/sitemap.xmlexists and is referenced in robots.txt. - Structured data (JSON-LD), e.g.
LocalBusinessorOrganizationwith name, address, phone and hours.
Quick check from the terminal:
curl -s https://yoursite.com | grep -iE "<title>|name=\"description\"|application/ld\+json|<h1"
curl -sI https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml | head -1
4. Speed on a phone
Run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools in mobile mode. Google's "good" Core Web Vitals thresholds are LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms and CLS under 0.1. The usual culprits are oversized hero images, render-blocking scripts and web fonts.
5. Can someone actually contact you?
This is the one devs skip. Phone numbers should be tel: links, emails mailto:, WhatsApp a https://wa.me/ link, and a contact or booking action should be visible without scrolling on mobile. If it's only an image or plain text, a lot of visitors (and tools) won't act on it.
6. Trust
HTTPS everywhere with no mixed content, real business details, and a privacy page.
That's most of what moves the needle for a small-business site. If you only do two things, fix the contact links and the mobile speed. Those tend to have the most direct effect on enquiries.
Disclosure: I'm with EmmaForYou. If you'd rather not do this by hand, our free website audit runs about 25 of these checks on a homepage and lists the top five fixes, with no sign-up needed: https://emmaforyou.lovable.app/website-audit
Originally published by Dev.to WebDev. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes — full credit and traffic to the original publisher.