DEV Community: PostCliq

How to check if your website is ready for AI search and assistants

PostCliq — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 07:16:05 +0000

By the PostCliq team at WP Creative, Sydney

More buyers now start their research by asking an AI assistant or reading an AI summary at the top of a search page. "Who does commercial cleaning in Parramatta?" or "What should I look for in an IT support provider?" can get a written answer, often with a handful of sources linked underneath.

You can't control whether an assistant mentions your business. Answers change from day to day and from person to person. What you can control is whether your website is readable by these tools in the first place. If a crawler is blocked, or your key facts are buried in an image, you've taken yourself out of the running before anything else matters.

This guide covers readiness: can AI search reach, read and quote your site? It's a practical check you can do yourself.

Step 1: Check who your robots.txt lets in

Every site has (or should have) a file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. It tells crawlers which parts of the site they may visit. Open yours and read it.

The thing to understand is that the big AI companies run more than one crawler. Broadly:

Training crawlers collect content that may be used to train models.
Search and retrieval crawlers fetch pages so an assistant can answer a question and cite a source.

Blocking a training crawler is a reasonable policy choice that many businesses make. Blocking a search crawler is different: it can quietly remove you from that tool's answers. Check each vendor's current documentation for the names of their crawlers, since they change, and make sure your rules match what you actually intend.

Also check:

that a security plugin, firewall or CDN isn't blocking bots your robots.txt allows
that important pages aren't marked "noindex" by accident, which often happens after a site rebuild
that your XML sitemap exists, lists your key pages and is referenced in robots.txt

Step 2: Make sure you're in the ordinary search indexes

AI search features lean heavily on traditional search indexes. Google has said that a page that's indexed and eligible to show a snippet can appear in its AI features, and some other assistants draw on Bing's results. So the basics still matter.

Set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools if you haven't, submit your sitemap to both, and check the indexing reports for important pages that are "discovered but not indexed" or excluded. If a key service page isn't in the index, fixing that comes before anything AI-specific.

Step 3: Structure each page so a passage can be quoted

AI tools tend to lift short passages: an opening summary, a direct answer under a clear heading, a row from a table. Pages written as one long wall of text, or built from sliders and tabs, are harder to quote.

For your most important pages, check that:

there's one clear main heading (H1) that says what the page is about
subheadings follow in order and many are phrased the way a buyer would ask, such as "How much does a fit-out cost?" or "How long does it take?"
the main answer appears near the top, in plain sentences, not after three paragraphs of scene-setting
comparisons and specifications sit in real HTML tables, not screenshots

None of this is new. It's good writing for people, and it happens to suit machines too.

Step 4: Put the facts in text, not pictures

A surprising number of business websites hold their most important facts in images: a price list as a JPG, service areas on a map graphic, credentials in a logo strip. People can read them, but a crawler often can't, and an assistant can't quote what it can't read.

Go through the questions a buyer would ask before contacting you: what you do, where, for whom, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, and how to get started. Then check that each answer appears on your site as plain text, ideally on the page where someone would look for it. If the answer isn't on the site at all, no amount of technical work will get you cited for it.

Step 5: Check your structured data agrees with the page

Structured data (schema markup) is code that describes your business and pages in a machine-readable way: your organisation name, address, logo, FAQs and so on. It can help, but only if it's accurate.

Run your key pages through Google's Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator and look for:

errors and warnings
details that contradict the visible page, such as an old address, a different phone number or a logo URL that no longer loads
the same facts described differently on different pages

Contradictions are worse than missing markup, because they give tools two versions of the truth to choose from.

Step 6: Keep your facts consistent off the site

Assistants also learn about a business from other places: directory listings, review sites, industry associations and press. If your business name, description and address differ across those sources, the picture an assistant builds of you will be blurry.

Pick one short, accurate description of your business and use it everywhere you have a profile. Correct old listings that are wrong. Don't invent claims to look bigger. Stick to facts you'd be happy to defend.

Step 7: Test it by hand, and keep the results in perspective

Once the groundwork is done, ask a few AI assistants the questions your buyers would ask, and note whether your business or pages come up and which sources get cited. Do it every month or so with the same questions, so you're comparing like with like.

Keep it in perspective. A single answer on a single day tells you very little, and anyone offering a precise "share of voice" figure for AI assistants should explain exactly how they measured it. Readiness is something you can fix and check. Mentions are something you influence over time.

A free way to run the readiness checks

PostCliq, the free website audit we built at WP Creative, includes AI readiness as one of its seven scored categories. It reads your robots.txt and reports crawler by crawler whether search and retrieval bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google and Microsoft are allowed, keeping training crawlers separate. It also checks heading structure, whether the main answer sits near the top of the page, whether key facts are in text, and flags structured data that contradicts the page.

To be clear about its limits, these are readiness checks. They aren't a measurement of how often ChatGPT or any other assistant mentions your brand. The audit is free with no credit card, reads up to 50 public pages, and never changes anything on your site. The full list of what it does and doesn't do is on its official information page at postcliq.com/ai-information.

AI search is moving quickly, but the foundations aren't. Let the right crawlers in, write clear pages with the facts in plain text, and keep your story consistent everywhere it appears. That's what makes a website easy to quote.

PostCliq is built and operated by WP Creative, a web design and development agency in Sydney.

This article was first published on the PostCliq blog.

Why B2B website visitors don't enquire: a 7-point check

PostCliq — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 07:14:57 +0000

By the PostCliq team at WP Creative, Sydney

Most B2B websites aren't short of visitors. They're short of enquiries. Someone searches, clicks an ad or follows a link, lands on a page, looks around for a minute and leaves without filling in the form or picking up the phone.

It's tempting to respond by buying more traffic. Usually the better first move is to look at what happens after the click. If the page a visitor lands on is slow, vague or hard to act on, more visitors just means more people leaving.

Here's a seven-point check you can run on your own site in an afternoon. You don't need special software for most of it, just a phone, a laptop and an honest pair of eyes. Work through it in order, because the first points tend to matter most.

1. Can a visitor find the next step in five seconds?

Open your homepage and your main service page on your phone. Without scrolling, can you tell what you're meant to do next? "Book a call", "Request a quote" and "Talk to us" are all fine. What doesn't work is a page where the only action is a hamburger menu, or where three equally loud buttons compete for attention.

Check that:

every key page has one obvious primary action
the button says what happens next, not just "Submit" or "Learn more"
the contact path works from every page, including blog posts, which often get more search traffic than service pages

2. Is the enquiry form asking for too much?

Forms are where a lot of B2B enquiries quietly die. Every extra field is another reason to stop, especially on a phone. Ask yourself which fields you actually need before the first reply. Often that's a name, an email address and one question about what they need. Budget, company size and how they heard about you can wait for the conversation.

While you're there, fill the form in yourself, on mobile and desktop. Check that:

error messages make sense and don't wipe what you typed
the form actually sends, and the confirmation tells the person what happens next
the enquiry arrives in the right inbox. It's surprisingly common for forms to send to an address nobody checks any more.

3. Does the page answer the question the visitor arrived with?

A visitor who clicks an ad for "commercial fit-out Sydney" and lands on a generic homepage has to work out for themselves whether you do what they searched for. Many won't bother.

For each of your main landing pages, write down the search, ad or link that brings people there. Then read the top of the page and ask whether it answers that question straight away. Plain statements beat clever ones. "We design and build office fit-outs for Sydney businesses of 20 to 200 staff" tells a buyer more than "Spaces that inspire".

4. Does the page load quickly on a phone?

Speed isn't only a technical score. It's the first thing a visitor experiences, and on a mobile connection a slow page can lose people before they've read a word.

Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool is a good place to start. Where your site has enough visitors, it shows field data from real Chrome users as well as a lab test. Pay most attention to how long the main content takes to appear on mobile. Common culprits on B2B sites include oversized hero images and background videos, too many third-party scripts (chat widgets, trackers, embedded social feeds) and heavy page-builder themes.

5. Is there enough evidence to trust you?

B2B buyers are usually spending someone else's money, so they look for reasons to feel safe. That doesn't mean plastering the page with badges. It means making real evidence easy to find:

named examples of work, with what you actually did
genuine reviews or testimonials, with permission and attribution
who is behind the business, with real names and photos
a physical address, ABN and contact details where people expect them
a site that works over HTTPS without browser warnings

Only use proof you can back up. An unsupported claim does more damage than no claim at all.

6. Can people with different needs use the site?

Accessibility problems are also conversion problems. Low-contrast text, buttons too small to tap, form fields without labels and content that can't be reached by keyboard all stop some visitors from enquiring. Run a free checker such as WAVE or the accessibility section of Lighthouse, then try tabbing through your enquiry form without a mouse. If you get stuck, so will some of your visitors.

7. Can you see where people drop off?

You can't fix what you can't see. Check that your analytics records an enquiry as a key event, and that the event fires only when a form is actually sent, not when the page loads. Then look at enquiries by landing page rather than in total. A page with plenty of sessions and very few enquiries is usually the best place to start.

If you use Google Analytics 4, compare enquiry rates by landing page over the same period. Behaviour tools such as Microsoft Clarity can show dead clicks (people clicking things that aren't links) and quick backs. Treat those signals as clues to investigate rather than proof of what went wrong.

Put the findings in order

Once you've been through the seven points you'll probably have a long list. Don't try to fix everything at once. Pick the three changes most likely to affect enquiries, make them, then check again after a week or two to see whether they held. For most B2B sites, fixes to the form and the next step come before anything cosmetic.

Write down for each change what you saw, why it matters, what you changed and how you'll know it worked. That habit stops a website review turning into a list of opinions.

Running the check for free

If you'd rather not do every step by hand, PostCliq is a free website audit we built at WP Creative that works through the same kinds of checks. It reads up to 50 public pages of your site and scores seven categories: enquiry journey (weighted most), speed and page experience, content clarity, search visibility, accessibility, technical trust and AI readiness. Each finding comes with its evidence, why it matters for enquiries, a specific action and a way to verify the fix, and the report starts with three quick wins.

It doesn't change anything on your site, needs no plugin or password, and you can connect Google Analytics 4, Search Console or Microsoft Clarity if you want traffic context. It's free, with no credit card: one website for a brand or five client sites for an agency, with one audit per site every seven days.

Whichever way you run it, the point is the same. Before you pay for more clicks, make sure the visitors you already have can find a reason, and an easy way, to get in touch.

Want help acting on what you find? WP Creative is the Sydney web design and development agency behind PostCliq.

This article was first published on the PostCliq blog.