AnswerReadyCan ChatGPT find, read and recommend your business?
More customers now ask AI assistants instead of searching. AnswerReady checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude can reach your website, understand it and quote it, then shows exactly what to fix first.
You get a 0–100 score, the evidence behind every finding and a fix list ranked by impact.
What does the audit check?
25 checks in six areas, each tied to evidence from your site: the actual robots.txt line, the missing schema field, the question heading without an answer.
AI crawler access
robots.txt rules and firewall settings for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google and Bing crawlers. Blocked crawlers can't cite you.
Readable without JavaScript
Most AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. We check that your words are in the HTML they actually receive.
Structured data
Organization or LocalBusiness, FAQ, Service, Article and Review markup, checked for errors and missing fields.
Answer-shaped content
Question headings with short, direct answers underneath: the passages AI answers tend to quote.
Who you are
Title, description, About page, contact details, reviews and named experts that make you a trustworthy source.
Freshness and discovery
Sitemap, update dates, canonical URLs and llms.txt.
Why does AEO matter for a small business?
When someone asks an AI assistant "who's the best accountant near me?" or "how much does a roof repair cost?", it reads a handful of websites and writes one answer, often naming one or two businesses. If your site blocks AI crawlers, hides its text behind JavaScript or never answers the question plainly, the assistant quotes someone else.
Most of the fixes are cheap: a robots.txt line, a block of structured data, a few headings rewritten as the questions your customers ask.
Read the plain-English guide to AEOHow does it work?
- 1Enter your website address.
- 2We read your homepage, robots.txt, sitemap and key pages the way an AI crawler would, and test whether your firewall lets AI crawlers in.
- 3You get a score, the top fixes in plain English and every finding with its evidence, on a page you can share with your web person.
Learn AEO, GEO and AI SEO
Plain-English guides to getting found and cited by AI search.
What is AEO?
AEO (answer engine optimization) means making your website easy for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude to find, understand and cite. What it is, why it matters and where to start.
AEO vs SEO
SEO gets your page ranked as a link; AEO gets your answer quoted inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. A side-by-side comparison and what to do first.
What is GEO?
GEO (generative engine optimization) is optimizing content to appear in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Where the term comes from and what works.
AI crawlers and robots.txt
Every major AI crawler user agent (OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, Apple, Microsoft and more), which ones affect AI search, and a copy-paste robots.txt.
llms.txt guide
llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file that summarises your website for AI tools. What it is, a copy-paste template, and an honest look at whether AI companies use it.
Get recommended by ChatGPT
How ChatGPT search finds and chooses businesses to recommend, and the steps that make yours easier to cite: crawler access, clear answers, structured data and reviews.
AEO checklist
A practical answer engine optimization checklist: crawler access, rendering, structured data, answer-shaped content, entity details and freshness. The same 25 checks our free audit runs.
Frequently asked questions
What is AEO?
AEO (answer engine optimization) means making your website easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude to find, understand and cite when they answer someone's question. It builds on SEO, but the goal is to be quoted or recommended in the answer, not just listed as a link.
Is the audit really free?
Yes. Enter any public website and you get the full score, the evidence behind every finding and the prioritised fix list, with no sign-up. If you'd like help making the fixes, you can ask us for a walkthrough, but you don't have to.
How is the score calculated?
We read your homepage, robots.txt, sitemap, llms.txt and up to five key pages, then run 25 checks across six areas worth 100 points in total. Every check is deterministic: the same site gives the same score, and each finding shows the evidence we saw.
Does a high score guarantee AI assistants will recommend me?
No. The audit measures what's on your website, which AI systems need in order to read and trust you. Being recommended also depends on reviews, mentions on other sites and your competitors, and AI answers vary from one run to the next. A good score removes the obstacles you control.
Should I block GPTBot and other AI crawlers?
It depends which ones. Crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User and PerplexityBot fetch pages to answer questions right now, so blocking them keeps you out of those answers. Training crawlers such as GPTBot and Google-Extended collect data for future models; blocking them is a business choice and doesn't affect your score.
What does the audit do to my website?
Very little: about a dozen ordinary page requests, three at a time, the same as a visitor clicking around. We don't log in, submit forms or test for vulnerabilities. Our crawler identifies itself as AEOAuditBot.