What an "AI-readable" website actually means
More people now ask an AI assistant for a plumber than open a search engine. The nine engineering checks that decide whether the answer can be you — and the one thing no website build can deliver.
Someone in your town needs a plumber tonight. A few years ago they typed “plumber near me” into Google and scanned ten blue links. Increasingly, they ask an AI assistant instead and get one answer — a name, a phone number, maybe a sentence about why.
That answer comes from what the assistant can actually read on the web. And most small business websites, to an AI, are close to unreadable: the text is assembled by scripts after the page loads, the opening hours are buried in a paragraph, nothing says which page is the “real” one, and the site’s own rules politely ask AI crawlers to go away.
The good news: this is an engineering property, not a marketing one. It is fully under your control, it is done once, and it lasts.
The checklist
Every site we build scores nine out of ten on this list, and we’ll show you where yours lands. Here is what each point means in plain terms.
| # | Check | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Content is in the page itself, not assembled by scripts | An AI crawler sees the same page a visitor sees |
| 2 | Structured data (Schema.org) | Your business, services and FAQs are labelled in a format machines can read, not just prose |
| 3 | An llms.txt file |
A site map written specifically for AI systems |
| 4 | A plain-text version of every page | An AI doesn’t have to guess which part is the article and which is the menu |
| 5 | Correct heading levels | An AI can tell where an answer starts and ends |
| 6 | Key facts stored as data | Opening hours, address, service area and prices are fields, not sentences buried in paragraphs |
| 7 | Author and last-updated signals | Every page can say who wrote it and when it was last changed |
| 8 | robots.txt explicitly allows AI crawlers |
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and friends are named and allowed, rather than blocked by a default |
| 9 | Correct canonical URLs | When an AI cites you, it sends people to the right page |
The tenth point — and why it isn’t included
Other websites mentioning and citing you.
This is the part that happens outside your website: directories, local news, industry sites, partners linking to you. It is what SEO people call off-page work. No website build can deliver it, and we don’t sell it as part of one. Anyone who tells you a website build alone will “get you recommended by ChatGPT” is selling you the tenth point they can’t deliver.
We’d rather say nine and be precise than say ten and be caught out.
What we can promise, and what we can’t
- ✅ We can promise your website is readable to AI systems. That is an engineering fact we control.
- ⛔ We cannot promise an AI will recommend you. That depends on your competitors, on each AI company’s own choices, and on your industry — none of which a website controls.
The line between those two sentences is exactly where honest advice ends and sales talk begins.
Where the nine points show up
You will see these checks come up elsewhere in these guides:
- Point 1 is why we don’t use review widgets — see Google reviews on your own website.
- Points 2, 5 and 9 are the same things search engines have wanted for years; see what SEO cannot fix for the difference between getting the foundations right and chasing rankings.
Related
- Technical SEO standards — the full engineering specification behind these nine points.
- Pricing — AI-readiness is part of every build, not an extra.