How the check works
The AI Website Readiness Check looks at your website the way a search engine or an AI assistant would: it requests your public pages, reads what is openly published, and reports what it sees. It never signs in, never uses your accounts and never changes anything.
Last updated 2026-08-26.
The ten checks
Can your website be found?
- Is your website working and secure?
- Your website should open properly and use a secure address beginning with https://. This protects visitors and helps them feel confident using your site. If a page does not open reliably, or the address is not secure, browsers warn visitors and search engines have less reason to send people there.The standard we grade against. Secure https, a valid certificate, at most one redirect to the final address and a first response inside one second.
- Can Google access your website?
- Google needs permission to read your public pages before it can consider showing them in search results. A single leftover setting can quietly ask Google to stay away from a page you actually want people to find.The standard we grade against. No noindex anywhere on the public site, no blanket robots.txt disallow, and a self-referencing canonical on every page.
- Does your website have a sitemap?
- A sitemap is a simple list of your important website pages. It helps search engines find their way around your site. Without a sitemap, search engines have to guess which pages exist by following links, and newer pages can take longer to be discovered.The standard we grade against. A working XML sitemap, referenced from robots.txt, listing only canonical pages you would show a buyer.
- Can search engines find your important pages?
- Your main services, products and information should be easy to reach through clear links, not hidden deep inside your website. Pages that nothing links to are hard for both people and search engines to reach, however good the content is.The standard we grade against. Ten or more internal pages linked from the homepage, all returning 200, all indexable, all canonicalised to your own domain.
Can AI tools access it?
- Can ChatGPT access your website?
- ChatGPT uses a search crawler called OAI-SearchBot to discover public website content. If it is blocked, ChatGPT may have difficulty reading and clearly linking to your pages in search results. More people now ask an assistant instead of typing a search. Access does not guarantee that you will be mentioned, but being blocked removes the possibility.The standard we grade against. OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot all allowed on public pages, with only private areas disallowed.
Can they understand your business?
- Is it clear what your business does?
- Customers and AI tools should understand your business without having to guess. Assistants summarise your homepage in a sentence or two. If that sentence is not already on the page, they have to improvise.The standard we grade against. A 30-60 character descriptive title, exactly one H1, a 70-160 character description and 300+ words of readable copy naming what you do and where.
- Are your main services or products clearly explained?
- Giving each important service or product a clear page helps customers, Google and AI tools understand exactly what you offer. A dedicated page can be matched to a specific question. A single list on the homepage usually cannot.The standard we grade against. A dedicated, linked page for every service or product line you actually sell, with its own heading and detail.
- Does your website answer real customer questions?
- People often ask Google and ChatGPT complete questions. Clear answers make your website more useful in those moments. Useful, specific answers written by people who do the work are what assistants tend to quote and what buyers actually read.The standard we grade against. A guide, FAQ or journal area, several question-style headings, and FAQ structured data where the answers are visible on the page.
Can customers trust and use it?
- Does your website show that the business is real and trustworthy?
- People need to understand who is behind the website and why they can trust its information. Contact details, named people and real examples are the simplest way to show a website belongs to a real business. Not every business needs every signal.The standard we grade against. Contact details in text, an About page, a policy page, named proof of work and Organization or LocalBusiness structured data.
- Does your website work well on a phone?
- Many visitors will open your website on a phone. It should be easy to read and use without zooming or waiting. Most first visits happen on a phone. A page that is slow or hard to read there loses people before they read a word.The standard we grade against. A device-width viewport, under 1.5 MB downloaded, a response under 1.5 seconds and alt text on almost every image.
How the score is calculated
Each check is worth up to ten points, graded against the published standard above rather than against a simple pass or fail. Inside each check we record every signal we measured with its own verdict, so you can see exactly what earned or cost the points. The score is the share of points earned across the checks we were actually able to complete. When something cannot be checked, we say so and leave it out of the score rather than counting it against you. Improvements are ordered by commercial impact first, then by how far the check fell short.
- 80–100 Strong foundation
- 60–79 Good start, with room to improve
- 40–59 Some important gaps
- 0–39 Build the foundations
Limitations
- Results use publicly available website information.
- Results are indicators, not guarantees.
- The scan does not guarantee search rankings, AI citations or recommendations.
- The tool cannot confirm Google indexing without private Search Console information.
- No login or account access is required.
- Studio Comms is not affiliated with Google or OpenAI.
- Relevant product names are trademarks of their respective owners.
- Some websites build their content in the browser. The check reads the page as it is delivered, so heavily script-driven pages may show less than a visitor sees.
- Some websites block automated requests. When that happens we say we could not check, rather than guessing.