Most websites were built to persuade humans who had already arrived. AI readiness asks a different question: if a machine visited your site tonight on behalf of a buyer (allowed in, reading fast, quoting selectively), would it leave with the facts needed to recommend you?
For a surprising number of Australian businesses the answer is no, for reasons that cost little to fix and go unnoticed for years.
Here's the 12-point audit we run first on every new engagement. It's organised into four groups (access, structure, facts, identity), and none of it requires a developer to check, though a few fixes might need one.
Access: can AI reach and read you? (points 1–3)
- Your robots.txt isn't blocking AI crawlers. Check yoursite.com.au/robots.txt for disallow rules on agents like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. Some security plugins and CDN presets block them by default: an invisible decision that removes you from AI answers entirely.
- Your content exists without JavaScript. If your pages render as an empty shell until scripts run, many crawlers see the shell. View a key page's source: if your actual copy isn't in the HTML, that's a conversation with your developer.
- Your site is fast and reliably up. Crawlers give slow sites less attention, and a page that times out is a page that doesn't exist. Aim for pages loading in a couple of seconds on a normal connection.
Structure: does your site explain itself? (points 4–6)
- Schema markup on the pages that matter. LocalBusiness or Organization markup with your name, address, phone and hours; Service, Product and FAQPage markup where relevant. Structured data is you filling in the engine's form instead of hoping it guesses.
- Headings that are questions and answers, not slogans. "What does a rental appraisal cost?" is retrievable; "Excellence in property, delivered" is not. Every important page should be skimmable by its headings alone.
- FAQ blocks on service pages. Genuine questions with direct answers are the closest format to how engines quote: three to six per key page, answering what buyers actually ask, not what marketing wishes they'd ask.
Facts: could a machine quote you? (points 7–9)
- Explicit prices or price guidance. "From $2,500" is a fact an engine can pass on; "competitive rates" is noise. If exact prices vary, publish ranges and what drives them: silence just means the answer quotes a competitor who spoke.
- Explicit scope: services and areas served. Name the services you do and don't offer and the suburbs, regions or states you cover. "Servicing the greater Newcastle area including Maitland and Lake Macquarie" answers a question machines are asked constantly.
- Visible freshness. Dated content, current-year references, updated listings. Engines prefer sources that look alive, and a site whose newest signal is 2022 reads as abandoned even if the business is thriving.
Identity: does the web agree on who you are? (points 10–12)
- One consistent name, address and phone everywhere. Your site, Google Business Profile, directories and socials should match exactly: every variant forces engines to guess whether two records are one business.
- An llms.txt file. An emerging convention: a plain-text summary at yoursite.com.au/llms.txt telling AI systems who you are, what you do and where your key pages live. Low effort, no downside, and adoption signals you take machine readers seriously.
- Third-party corroboration. Reviews on platforms engines trust, directory listings, local mentions. Your site makes claims; the rest of the web confirms them, and engines weigh confirmation heavily when deciding who's safe to recommend.
91%
of agents are effectively invisible in AI answers in their own market, per the 2026 State of AI SEO in Real Estate industry benchmarks
Scoring it, and what to do next
Score a point per item you can honestly tick. Ten or more and you're ahead of most of your market: invisibility that widespread means the bar is lower than the checklist makes it feel.
Six to nine, you have cheap wins available, and the access and facts groups come first: being readable and quotable outranks everything else. Five or below, your website is likely the bottleneck in your AI visibility, and fixing it is exactly the foundations stage of our GEO and SEO services.
If you'd rather have the audit run for you, with the engine-by-engine baseline to go with it, that's a free AI visibility check.
Access first: if crawlers are blocked or your content needs JavaScript to exist, nothing else on the list can work. Then explicit facts (points 7–9), because they're what engines actually quote. Structure and identity compound from there.
Rarely. Most failures are content and configuration, not architecture: a robots.txt rule, missing schema, vague copy, inconsistent listings. A genuinely JavaScript-dependent site is the main case where developer work becomes unavoidable.
Adoption is early and uneven, which is why it's one point of twelve rather than the headline. The case for it: minutes of effort, zero risk, and it's the one file whose entire purpose is stating your facts to machine readers on your own terms.
Quarterly is plenty for the audit itself, plus a spot-check whenever something material changes: pricing, service areas, a site migration, a new security plugin. Migrations and plugins are the classic ways sites silently fail point one.