AI search optimization, step by step

1. Send your website

Paste your URL into the form. Optional but useful: what you sell, the questions your buyers ask, and the competitors you lose to. You can also attach notes, a services list or last month's report (PDF, DOCX, TXT, MD, CSV or XLSX, up to 10 files of 20 MB). Agencies can say the site belongs to a client, and the report is written to hand over without mentioning us.

A good brief looks like this:

Website: https://yourbusiness.com
We sell: commercial HVAC maintenance in Austin, TX
Buyers ask: best commercial HVAC contractor Austin, HVAC maintenance contract cost
Competitors: competitor.com

2. We work out your business and your buyers' questions

We read your home page, services or product pages, pricing, about, contact and FAQ pages, plus a few top pages from your sitemap. From that and your brief we build 15 to 20 questions the way a buyer would ask an assistant or a search engine, in roughly this mix:

3. We test every question in live search

Each question runs through live web search with US results. We record the top domains, whether you appear and at which position (1-10 or not found), which competitors appear, and what kind of page wins. This is the source pool AI answers draw from: OpenAI says its OAI-SearchBot crawler is what surfaces sites in ChatGPT search, and Google says pages need to be indexed and eligible for a snippet to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

To be plain about it: we do not log into ChatGPT or any other assistant, and the report never claims we did. Assistant answers vary from one ask to the next; the search results they cite are what you can measure and change.

4. We audit what AI systems can read

• robots.txt rules for each AI and search crawler, and the HTTP status your home page returns to each crawler's user agent (a firewall can block a bot that robots.txt allows)
• sitemap present and how many URLs; llms.txt present
• titles, meta descriptions and H1s of key pages
• schema.org types found in your JSON-LD, FAQ markup
• for local businesses: name, address and phone the same on every page
• whether the main text is in the raw HTML or only appears after JavaScript runs
• canonical and noindex tags
• whether the first screen says plainly what you sell, where, for whom and at what price range

5. You get the score, the ranked fixes and the files

The score is 0-100 and the formula is printed in the report: crawler access 25, search presence for the buyer questions 30, structured data 15, quotable facts and answer pages 20, llms.txt and sitemap 10. Each fix is ranked with what to do, why, the effort in minutes or hours, and which file it uses.

6. Next month we test the same questions again

Send the same site again (attach last month's report if you like) and the new report gets a "Since last month" section: which questions you now appear for, what changed in the crawler table, what is still open. Two rounds of changes are included per audit if something in the report is off.

What we check before you get it

• The JSON-LD parses as valid JSON.
• Every llms.txt link is on your domain and returns 200.
• Every question has a recorded result, and the score parts add up.
• No fact in the fixes that is not in your site's text or your notes. Where a fact is missing (hours, a price, a service area), it says [CHECK: what is needed] instead of a guess.

What this does not cover

• No promise that an AI assistant will name you.
• No edits to your site and no logins; you paste the fixes.
• No link buying, reviews or forum posts.
• No daily tracking of AI answers; it is a monthly audit.
• We fetch only your own domain, at most 40 requests, so very large sites get a sample of key pages, not a full crawl.

Why we built this: we run our own software products and measure, in our own analytics, where signups come from. Over 34 days, visitors arriving from ChatGPT produced 46 signups on one product, 27 on a second and 15 on a third; Gemini sent 11. ChatGPT visitors converted from visit to signup at about 31% (internal analytics, November 2026). That is a small channel next to Google, but it converts, and we wanted the same checks for every site we run. This audit is those checks, written up for your site.

Questions

More about AI Search Audit

Sources (checked 2026-11-09): developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots · developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features