How to Make Your Website Readable for AI: A 15-Point Checklist

AI assistants can only recommend what they can read. In our audits, the reasons a website is hard for AI to understand are rarely exotic. They fall into four groups: access, structure, clarity and trust. Here's the checklist we use.

Access: Can AI Tools Reach Your Content?

1. AI search crawlers are allowed in robots.txt. Check for rules blocking OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot and Claude's search crawlers. Training crawlers are a separate choice — see should you block AI crawlers?
2. Your firewall or CDN isn't blocking bots wholesale. "Bot protection" settings can silently block AI crawlers even when robots.txt allows them.
3. Key content is in the HTML. Many AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. View your page source (not the inspector) and search for a sentence from the page — if it's missing, crawlers may miss it too.
4. Pages are indexable. No stray noindex tags on important pages. Google's AI Overviews rely on pages in Google's index.
5. You have an XML sitemap — and optionally an llms.txt pointing to your key pages.

Structure: Can They Find the Right Part?

6. One clear H1 per page that says what the page is about.
7. Descriptive subheadings — ideally phrased like the questions customers ask ("How long does a Shopify build take?").
8. Lists and tables for facts. Prices, steps, specs and comparisons are far easier to extract from a table than from a paragraph.
9. Structured data that matches the page. Organization, Service, Product, Article, FAQ and Breadcrumb schema. Never mark up things that aren't visible.

Clarity: Will They Understand It Correctly?

10. State the facts plainly. What you do, who it's for, where you work, what it costs. "We craft bespoke digital journeys" tells an AI (and a customer) nothing.
11. Lead with the answer. Put the direct answer in the first sentence under each heading, then explain.
12. Use plain language. Shorter sentences and common words. Our checker reports a Flesch reading-ease score — above 50 is a good target for most business pages.
13. Keep facts current. Outdated prices or services get repeated back to customers as if they were true.

Trust: Will They Rely on It?

14. Clear business identity. Organization schema, consistent name and contact details, and an About page that says who's behind the business.
15. Authorship and dates on articles. Named authors, publish and update dates, and links to original sources for any statistics.

Test It in Two Minutes

Our free AI Readability Checker runs most of these checks on any page — including which AI crawlers your robots.txt allows and how much of your content is readable without JavaScript. Pair it with the SEO Checker for the traditional search basics.

Want every page checked and fixed? Our AI Readiness Audit covers the whole site and includes the fixes. For the strategy behind it, read what AI SEO is.