Is my website readable by AI?

Where facts get trapped

• Hours, specials or prices posted as a picture or a flyer.
• Menus, price lists and service lists as PDF downloads only.
• Pages that show text only after a click, a pop-up or a slider.
• A site that blocks AI crawlers in its robots.txt file, or a security setting that blocks them. Some hosts and security services offer this as a one-click switch, and some turn it on by default.
• No machine-readable business details, so the assistant has to guess which line is the address and which is the phone number.

Three checks you can do yourself

• The highlight test: on your homepage, try to select your hours and address with your mouse. If you can’t highlight it, it’s an image, and many AI readers can’t use it.
• The robots.txt test: open yoursite.com/robots.txt. If you see GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot next to “Disallow: /”, you’re blocking that assistant.
• The security test: if your site uses Cloudflare or a similar service, look for a setting about blocking AI bots or AI crawlers, and decide on purpose whether you want it on.

How much it matters

On our own site, over two weeks, AI companies’ crawlers fetched our pages about 3,100 times, and 124 of those were ChatGPT reading a page live while answering someone. If a page can’t be read in that moment, it can’t be quoted.

A readable small-business site has

1. Hours, address and phone as real text

   Images and PDFs get skipped.

2. A page per main service or product line

   One page, one clear answer.

3. Business details in machine-readable form

   Name, address, hours and category, labelled.

4. AI crawlers not blocked

   Check robots.txt and security settings.

5. A short llms.txt fact sheet

   A plain summary in one place.

6. Fast pages that work on a phone

   Slow or broken pages get dropped.

Check it yourself in five minutes

1. 1

   Open ChatGPT in a private (incognito) window, so it isn't shaped by your own history, and ask: “best [what you do] near [your town]”

2. 2

   Ask the same question two more times, worded a little differently. Answers change from one ask to the next, so one try is not a verdict.

3. 3

   Write down who gets named, in what order, and what it says about each. Then ask it directly about your business by name and check every fact: hours, address, what you sell.

4. 4

   Do the same in Perplexity and Claude if you can. The businesses that show up everywhere are the ones whose facts are clear in the places all of them read.

Questions