AI Says: How AI-Ready
Is Your Website?

AI readiness is how well your website can be found, understood, trusted and quoted by AI-powered search tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. It covers the foundations those systems depend on: pages crawlers can reach and index, a clearly defined business identity, content with real substance, answers written so they can be lifted cleanly, and proof that you are a genuine, contactable business. The more of those foundations you have in place, the easier you make it for an answer engine to describe you accurately and put you forward.

SEO helps your pages rank in a list of search results; AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) helps your content become the answer itself. SEO concentrates on crawlability, relevance and authority so a page earns the click, while AEO shapes content so a machine can extract a direct, self-contained answer — question-led headings, answer-first paragraphs and FAQPage markup. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) extends the same thinking to the wider web: which sources generative AI draws on and cites. Each layer builds on the one before, so strong SEO foundations make AEO and GEO far more effective.

Make your business easy for AI to identify, verify and quote — recommendations are earned from those signals rather than bought. Start with an unambiguous identity: the same business name, address and services everywhere, Organization or LocalBusiness structured data, and sameAs links to profiles that corroborate you. Then publish pages that answer the specific, qualified questions your customers ask (a service, a location, a type of customer), lead each one with the answer, and earn mentions on reputable third-party sites, because assistants favour businesses that independent sources confirm.

The AI Readiness Score measures, out of 100, how well your website is prepared to be understood and cited by AI-powered search. It combines 32 checks across 5 weighted categories: Technical Readiness (25%), Entity & Brand Signals (25%), Content Authority (20%), Answer Readiness (20%), Trust Signals (10%). Every check shows what was found, the points it earned and exactly how to fix it, so the score works as a plan rather than a verdict.

Fix access first, then identity, then answers. If robots.txt blocks crawlers, a page carries a noindex tag or there is no XML sitemap, nothing else you publish can be read, so those come first. Next, make your identity unambiguous with Organization or LocalBusiness structured data, a descriptive title and a plain statement of what you do and where; then reshape key pages around customer questions with answer-first paragraphs. Your audit ranks these for your own site by the points each fix recovers and the effort involved, and moves up anything where competitors are measurably ahead.

Yes — structured data is one of the most direct ways to tell a machine exactly what your content means. Schema.org markup in JSON-LD states facts explicitly: Organization and LocalBusiness define who you are and where you operate, Service describes what you offer, FAQPage pairs questions with their answers, and BreadcrumbList shows how pages relate. It works alongside good content rather than replacing it, removing the guesswork so search engines and AI systems can match your page to the right question with confidence.

It varies with how quickly your pages are recrawled, how competitive your topic is and how much needs to change. Technical fixes such as unblocking crawlers or adding structured data can be picked up as soon as search engines and AI crawlers revisit your site, while authority built through deeper content and third-party mentions accumulates over months. AI answers also shift as models and indexes update, so the reliable approach is to re-run your audit after each round of changes and track progress on the signals you control.

Yes — the full audit is free, with no credit card, no trial period and nothing locked away. You get your score, every check with its evidence, the SEO and AEO findings, competitor benchmarking and your prioritised recommendations. We simply ask for your email address before your results open, and booking a call with a specialist is free too.

Your audit answers that directly: it identifies your closest competitors, crawls their public websites and scores them on the same SEO, AEO and readiness signals it measures on yours. You see category by category where their foundations are stronger, and any fix where a competitor is measurably ahead rises up your priority list. Which competitors AI platforms are actually naming is reviewed with you in the expert consultation.

Start with the free audit so your foundations are in order, then book a consultation and a specialist will review the platforms with you directly. The specialist puts the questions your customers actually ask to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI, reads how each one describes you, and shows which competitors are named instead. AI Says is independent and not connected to those platforms, which is why this is done by a person — and why you get interpretation and next steps, not just a screenshot of one answer.