AI readiness check

What this checks

Ask a question online today and you may never see a list of websites at all. You get a written answer, and one or two businesses get named inside it. Whether yours can be one of them depends on what an assistant finds when it reads your site.

This fetches your home page the way an assistant would, then reads your robots.txt, your sitemap and your llms.txt. It reports on four things in the order a machine meets them: whether it is allowed to fetch the page, whether it can find the facts once it has, whether there is enough to name you as a source, and whether all that happened before a crawl budget ran out.

Every finding says what was actually found rather than a bare pass or fail, so you can judge it yourself. A site already in good shape is told so plainly.

SEO, AEO and GEO — the three doors

SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, is the one you know. It decides whether your page appears when someone types a query, and how high. Keywords, links, speed, titles and descriptions. Twenty years old and still the foundation.

AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation, is being the source that answers the question rather than one of ten links offered. The featured snippet at the top of Google, the voice assistant reading a sentence aloud, the box that begins "according to". The question stops being "do we rank" and becomes "are we the answer".

GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation, is being represented correctly inside what an AI writes. When somebody asks an assistant to recommend a company like yours in your city, something has to be within the model’s reach for your name to appear at all.

In practice AEO and GEO overlap heavily and many people use the terms interchangeably. The distinction that matters is not the acronym: it is that answering and being quoted are now separate outcomes from ranking, and a site built only to rank will quietly lose both.

What makes a site quotable

Models are cautious about naming a business. They reach for sources they can parse cleanly and corroborate elsewhere, which in practice means a handful of unglamorous things: headings in order so a fact has a beginning and an end; the business published as structured data rather than only as pixels; an address and a telephone number stated as data a machine can act on; the same details repeated consistently somewhere else; and a page that arrives quickly enough to be read at all.

Notice what is not on that list — keyword density, more pages, a bigger blog. The work has moved from persuading a ranking algorithm to making a site genuinely easy to read and hard to doubt.

What it does not do

It reads your home page, not every page, and it reads the HTML your server sends. If your content is assembled by JavaScript in the browser, this will report very little text — which is the point, because many crawlers never run that JavaScript either.

It cannot tell you whether ChatGPT currently recommends you. Nobody can: those answers vary by phrasing, by user and by day. What it can tell you is whether anything is standing in the way, which is the part you control.

Nothing is stored against your name and there is no sign-up. Results are cached for a few minutes so two people checking the same site do not both make your server work for it.