10-Point Checklist: Make Your Website Readable to AI Assistants

Short answer: An AI-readable website is one AI assistants can reach and understand. This checklist covers the practical basics: letting crawlers in, publishing a sitemap, stating facts in plain text, labelling your business with structured data, and keeping details consistent.

None of these steps guarantees a recommendation. They remove common obstacles.

1. Check that AI crawlers are not blocked

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A blanket Disallow: / for all agents, or rules naming specific AI crawlers, can keep assistants out. These are separate controls, so decide on each one deliberately:

• GPTBot (OpenAI) is used for model training.
• OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI) is used to find and cite pages in ChatGPT search.
• ChatGPT-User (OpenAI) fetches a page when a ChatGPT user asks for it.
• ClaudeBot (Anthropic) and PerplexityBot (Perplexity) are those companies' crawlers.
• Google-Extended is a robots.txt token, not a separate crawler. It controls whether content Google has crawled can be used for Gemini training and grounding. It does not affect Google Search inclusion or ranking.

For example, blocking GPTBot does not by itself block OAI-SearchBot. Check each company's documentation, because these rules change.

2. Publish a sitemap and reference it

Create a sitemap.xml listing your important pages and point to it from robots.txt with a Sitemap: line. Submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

3. Make sure your content is in the HTML

Some crawlers do not run JavaScript. Right-click your page, choose "View page source" and check that your services, prices and contact details appear in the source, not only after scripts run.

4. Put the key facts in plain text

State on one page, in words: what you do, who for, where, hours, how to book, and how pricing works. Do not leave critical details only in images, PDFs or sliders.

5. Open sections with the answer

Under each heading, give the conclusion in the first sentence, then explain. Write headings as the questions customers ask, for example "How much does [service] cost?"

6. Add an FAQ page

Write real answers to real questions in short paragraphs. Ten good answers are better than thirty vague ones.

7. Add structured data (schema)

Use JSON-LD to label your business (LocalBusiness or a more specific type), your services, and your FAQ. Include name, phone, URL, service area, hours and links to your official profiles (sameAs). Validate it with Google's Rich Results Test or the Schema.org validator. Structured data must match what is visible on the page.

8. Keep your business details consistent

Use the same business name, phone number, city and service description on your site, Google Business Profile, Yelp, Apple Maps and other directories. Conflicting details are a common source of wrong answers.

9. Consider an llms.txt file

llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at your site root that summarises your site for language models. We are not aware of any major AI provider that has confirmed it reads this file from other websites, and Google has said its search systems do not use it. Treat it as optional and low-cost, not as a ranking lever, and recheck as the situation changes.

10. Show who is behind the business

Add an About page, contact details, and any real credentials, associations or awards you can document. Do not invent or exaggerate them.

How to test that your site is AI-readable

After making changes, run the question test from our article on checking whether AI recommends your business, and repeat it after a few weeks.

Need help? Book a free consultation or read about our AI visibility optimization service.

FAQ

Should I block AI crawlers? That is your call. Blocking them means assistants cannot read your pages directly, which may reduce how accurately they describe you. Allowing them is common for businesses that want to be found.

Do I need to know how to code? Items 4 to 6, 8 and 10 need no coding. Items 1 to 3, 7 and 9 usually need a website editor or developer.

Is schema markup required? No, but it helps machines identify your business details unambiguously.

Further reading: Google: introduction to structured data markup.

Written by the Miri Team.