Is your website ready for AI assistants, not just people?
Someone asks an assistant to find a plumber near them and get a price. Can it read your site and do what a person would? Here’s a short checklist.
A customer types into an assistant: “find me an electrician who can come this week and tell me roughly what it costs.” The assistant visits a few sites, reads what it can, and comes back with a short list. If yours was hard to read, it is not on the list, and you will never know you were asked.
This is a different question from the one in my post on getting cited by AI answers. That one is about being quoted. This one is simpler: when an assistant, or a person using one, lands on your site, can it find the facts and do the job a visitor would do?
Start with what Google says
Google’s documentation on AI features and your website says there are no extra requirements to appear in its AI features and that no special optimisations are necessary. I take that as a useful rule for all of this: a site that is clear, current and easy to crawl is already most of the way there. Nothing below is a trick.
1. Put the facts in plain text
Your services, prices (or a starting price), area, hours, phone number and address should be written as normal text on the page. Not inside an image, a slider, a PDF or a popup. A person can squint at a screenshot of your price list. A tool often cannot.
This also helps people on slow connections and anyone using a screen reader, so you are not building anything extra.
2. Give each page one clear job
A page called “Services” that covers everything in one long scroll is hard for anyone to use. A separate page for each thing you sell, with a heading that names it in the words customers use, makes it obvious what the page is about. It is the same advice I would give for human visitors.
3. Make the action work without guessing
If a visitor wants to call, the number should be a tappable link. If they want a quote, the form should be a real form with labelled fields and a visible button, not a design that only works by hovering or dragging. Booking tools and chat widgets that load from another company are fine, but check that your phone and email are still on the page as well. If the widget fails, the page should still give someone a way to reach you.
4. Keep one version of the truth
Your site, your Google Business Profile and your social pages should agree on name, address, phone and hours. When they disagree, a person gets confused and a tool has to pick one. Choose a master copy and update the rest from it.
5. Decide who may read it, on purpose
Your robots.txt file tells crawlers what they may visit. Many small sites carry an old block left over from the build, which keeps pages out of search. Check yours at yourdomain.com/robots.txt and make sure it does not block pages you want found.
There is a second decision that is new: whether AI companies may use your content to train their models. Google has said it plans to support a shared AI training control in robots.txt, based on work at the IETF, and gives 2027 as its target. So this is not something to rush. Decide in principle whether you are comfortable with it, and revisit once the control is live. Blocking training is a business choice, not a technical requirement, and it is separate from appearing in search.
What I would not spend money on
- A package that promises to “make your site AI-ready” with a file or a plugin. If it does not change what visitors can read and do, it changes nothing that matters.
- Rewriting every page to sound like a machine wrote it. Plain, specific writing is what works for people, and it is also what makes a page easy to quote. Generic copy hurts both, which I covered in AI slop on websites.
- Anyone who guarantees what an assistant will say about you. Nobody controls that.
A ten minute check
Open your homepage on your phone. Without scrolling past the first screen more than twice, can you find what you do, where, how to contact you, and what happens next? Then open your top service page and ask the same thing. Paste the page address into an assistant and ask it to summarise the business and say how to book. Where it gets something wrong, a visitor probably did too.
If you would like a second pair of eyes, my SEO and AI search audit covers these points and gives you a short list of fixes in order. You can also send me your site and I will tell you what I see.
Written with AI assistance. The angle, the argument and the editorial direction of this article are mine: I brainstormed and shaped it. The drafting was done with AI, and I reviewed and edited the final text before publishing.