More and more people ask ChatGPT their questions, or read the answer Google displays at the top of the page, without ever clicking a link. For a business, the question becomes: is my company part of those answers?
Before paying anyone to answer that, you can check a lot yourself. Here are seven checks, doable in an hour, with no technical skills. For each one, I explain what it means when the result isn't good.
1. Look at your website the way a machine sees it
Open your website, right-click, then "View page source". A wall of text appears: that's roughly what an AI receives. Use search (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) and look for an important sentence from your homepage, for instance the name of one of your services.
If you find it: good sign, your content is delivered directly.
If you don't: your text is probably built by a program at the moment the page is displayed. Browsers handle that fine, but many of the robots feeding AI tools don't go that far. Your content exists for your visitors, not for machines.
2. Measure speed on mobile
Go to PageSpeed Insights, paste your website address and pick the mobile tab.
Above 70: fine.
Below 50: you're losing visitors, and you're losing robots too. They have a time budget per website; when pages drag, they read fewer of them. It's the issue that comes up most often in the audits we run, and it's rarely inevitable: oversized images explain half the cases.
3. Check that each page answers one question
List your main pages. For each one, write the question it answers, in one sentence, the way a customer would ask it.
If you can do it for every page: your website is structured the way AI likes to read.
If several pages answer the same question, or one page covers five at once, machines won't know which one to cite. A catch-all "Our services" page listing eight trades will always be quoted less than a dedicated page for each.
4. Make sure your basic details are identical everywhere
Your exact name, your address, your phone number. Compare what's written on your website, on your Google Business Profile, in your trade association's directory, on your social media.
If everything matches: perfect.
If there are differences (an old address, a changed number, a different trading name), you're asking machines to choose between several versions of you. When in doubt, they cite someone else. It's the least technical fix, and often the most profitable.
5. Check whether your answers are text, or locked inside images
Are your prices in an image? Your service areas on a map? Your references in a downloadable PDF?
Anything that isn't text is, for a machine, more or less invisible. An AI won't read your price list if it's a photo of a table, and won't know you work in Manchester if it's written on an image of a map. The rule of thumb: everything that matters must also exist as text on the page.
6. Check that your pages are dated and up to date
Look for a date on your main pages. Look at the latest news published on your website.
If the last sign of activity is three years old, AI tools that favour recent sources will set you aside for a competitor who publishes. It isn't about volume: two useful pages per quarter beat an abandoned blog of forty articles.
7. Ask AI tools directly what they know about you
The most telling check, and the quickest. Open ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity and ask three questions:
- "What does [your company name] in [your town] do?"
- "Who would you recommend for [your trade] in [your town]?"
- "Which [your sector] companies are there in [your region]?"
If you don't appear anywhere, it's not a bug: nothing accessible online allows them to suggest you. If the answers about you are wrong (an old trade, a town you've left, a service you no longer offer), the machine has pieced your business together from outdated sources, for lack of a clear source on your side.
Run the test with two competitors' names as well. The comparison is often more instructive than the test on yourself.
What to do with the result
Count your answers.
Zero or one issue: your website is in good shape; your challenge lies elsewhere, probably in content and the questions you don't cover yet.
Two or three: these are targeted fixes, not a major project. A website that isn't fast enough or inconsistent details can be sorted out without rebuilding everything.
Four or more: the problem is structural. At that point, fixing things one by one often costs more than starting again on a clean base, and that's a decision to make with figures, not gut feeling.
These seven checks are exactly where we start when we look at a client's website. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on yours, get in touch.
And if you run these checks yourself and everything is green, great: you've just saved yourself a service.
