Is your site ready for AI search?
Buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of Google. Grade your site 0–100 on the five things that decide whether AI engines can read, understand, and cite you — with a concrete fix for every gap.
What we check (and what we don't)
Five weighted, heuristic checks — AI crawler access (30 pts: can GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot and the user-driven agents read your robots.txt?), llms.txt (15 pts), structured data (25 pts: Organization/WebSite identity plus rich types like FAQPage, Product, Article, BreadcrumbList), metadata basics (20 pts: title, description, canonical, Open Graph), and discoverability (10 pts: a reachable sitemap). These measure machine-readability, not citation success — a perfect score means AI can understand you, not that it recommends you. For the outcome side, see our answer engine optimization guide and entity SEO guide.
Readiness is step one. Citations are the goal.
BusinessMCP asks ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude your target prompts every week and reports whether your brand gets cited — alongside which AI crawlers actually hit your site.
Frequently asked questions
What is AEO (answer engine optimization)?
AEO is optimizing your site so AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude — can read, understand, and cite it when users ask questions. Where SEO targets ranked links, AEO targets being the answer: crawlable content, machine-readable structure (schema, llms.txt), and clear entity signals. The fundamentals overlap heavily with good technical SEO, which is why several of our checks would look familiar to any SEO audit.
Does llms.txt actually matter?
Honestly: it’s an emerging convention (llmstxt.org), not a ranking factor, and no AI vendor has committed to reading it the way search engines read robots.txt. But it costs minutes to add, some agents already fetch it, and it’s the only place you get to hand assistants a curated map of what you do and what to cite. We treat it as cheap insurance, and weight it at 15 of 100 accordingly.
Does a high score guarantee AI assistants will cite my brand?
No. These are heuristic readiness checks — they measure whether AI engines CAN read and understand your site, which is the prerequisite. Whether assistants actually recommend you depends on your content, authority, and competition. BusinessMCP’s AI-visibility tracking measures that outcome directly: it asks ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude your target prompts weekly and reports whether your brand gets cited.
Why does structured data matter for AI search?
JSON-LD schema (Organization, FAQPage, Product, Article, BreadcrumbList) gives AI engines unambiguous facts about who you are and what your pages contain, instead of forcing them to infer it from prose. Google’s AI Overviews and most retrieval pipelines lean on it. It’s our second-biggest weight (25 points) for that reason.
What exactly does the grader fetch from my site?
Four small requests to your domain only: robots.txt, llms.txt (and llms-full.txt), your homepage HTML (capped at 500KB), and a sitemap.xml reachability check. Nothing is stored, no third-party data providers are called, and the tool is rate-limited per visitor.