AI-Readiness Audit
An AI-readiness audit is a check of a website that tests whether AI crawlers can reach it, whether it serves HTTPS, whether facts like pricing, hours, and service area appear in plain text, and whether basic structured data is present.
Also known as: AI visibility audit, GEO audit, LLM readiness check
An AI-readiness audit asks a simple question about your website: if an answer engine tried to read this right now, what would it find? It's a checklist run against your live site covering the mechanical prerequisites (can the bots get in, is the connection secure, do the pages load without JavaScript tricks) and the content prerequisites (are the facts a model needs stated somewhere it can extract them). It comes before any advice about what to write, because a site the engines can't read can't be cited no matter how good the copy is.
The crawler checks are the ones most often failed silently. Your robots.txt may block GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot from a rule someone added in 2023. Your CDN or firewall may have an AI-bot block toggled on by default. The audit reads your robots.txt for each named bot and fetches your homepage as those bots to see whether it gets a page or a 403. HTTPS is checked too; an insecure site is a trust problem for engines and browsers alike.
The content checks look for facts in plain text. Pricing or at least price ranges, business hours, phone number, service area, and what you specifically do. A price list embedded in an image, a menu served as a PDF, or hours that live only in a JavaScript widget are invisible to a model summarizing your page. The audit flags where the facts are missing or unreadable, because those gaps are exactly what an engine fills with a competitor's name.
Structured data appears on the list, but with honest weighting. The audit checks for LocalBusiness markup because it helps classic search engines index you and it's cheap to add. It doesn't treat markup as an AI visibility lever, because Search Atlas tested that idea and found no correlation between schema coverage and LLM citation rates. If an audit you're being sold makes schema the headline finding, ask what evidence supports that.
Tibly runs an AI-readiness audit as part of its scan, testing crawler access for the major AI bots, HTTPS, plain-text facts, and structured data. Findings become Actions: where the fix is on your site, Tibly drafts the change and publishes it to your Tibly-hosted site; where it's a robots.txt rule or a firewall setting on a site hosted elsewhere, it tells you exactly what to change. The free report at /ai-visibility includes the audit.
Keep exploring the glossary
- CrawlabilityCrawlability is how easily automated bots from search engines and AI companies can discover, fetch, and read the pages on a website, determined by robots.txt rules, server responses, HTTPS, sitemaps, and whether content is visible without running JavaScript.
- robots.txt for AI Crawlersrobots.txt for AI crawlers means using the robots.txt file at your site's root to allow or block named AI bots such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, deciding which AI systems may read your pages for training or live answers.
- AI CrawlerAn AI crawler is an automated bot such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended that fetches web pages so an AI company can train its models or retrieve current information to answer user questions.
- Structured Data (schema.org / JSON-LD)Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually schema.org vocabulary written as JSON-LD, that labels facts like a business's name, address, hours, and services so search engines can index them precisely, though no study shows it causes AI citations.
Common questions about AI-Readiness Audit
- What does an AI-readiness audit check?
- Whether AI crawlers like GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are allowed and can actually fetch your pages; whether the site uses HTTPS; whether pricing, hours, phone, and service area appear in plain text; and whether LocalBusiness structured data is present. Crawler access and plain-text facts are the items that matter most.
- My site passes the audit. Why am I still not in AI answers?
- Passing means engines can read you, not that they'll choose you. What gets you named is the strength of what they read: specific service pages, consistent listings, recent reviews, and mentions on the directories each engine cites. The audit clears the path; prompt tracking and source analysis show what to build next.