How to Audit Your Site for AI Search Readiness

Run this 6-step audit to know exactly where your site stands with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — and what to fix first. Takes about 30 minutes for a typical marketing site.

1. Step 1

   Check AI crawler access

   Fetch your robots.txt and confirm GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended are allowed. A single Disallow: / for the wrong user-agent removes you from the AI web.

2. Step 2

   Grade your direct answers

   Pick 10 questions your customers ask. Open each landing page. If the first 200 words don't answer the question in 40-80 words, that page is invisible to AI answer engines.

3. Step 3

   Score your structured data coverage

   How many pages have Article, FAQPage, HowTo, or Product schema? Under 30% is a red flag; 80%+ is healthy.

4. Step 4

   Measure entity strength

   Do you have Organization schema with sameAs? Author pages with Person schema? A Wikidata entry? These are the signals LLMs use to decide you're a real entity.

5. Step 5

   Test 20 prompts across 3 engines

   Run your target prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Log every citation. If you're never cited, the fix is content — not more backlinks.

6. Step 6

   Prioritize fixes by impact

   Rank issues by (search volume × current gap). Fix the top 5 first. Re-audit in 30 days.