Is Your Site Ready for AI-Driven Search?

You can check whether your site is ready for AI-driven search by running an AI Search Readiness Audit, powered by SiteSignal’s LLM Readiness Framework.

This type of audit looks at six things that matter for both Google and AI models:

• Crawlability & indexability
  
• Structured data & semantic markup
  
• Content structure & chunking
  
• Answer alignment
  
• Knowledge-graph signals
  
• Competitive positioning
  

If these signals are weak or missing, tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity will struggle to recognise, understand, or cite your brand even if your traditional SEO looks fine.

Why AI-Driven Search Changes the Game

People don’t just “Google it” anymore. They:

• Ask ChatGPT which tools to use
  
• Ask Gemini to summarise providers in their city
  
• Ask Claude to compare platforms before buying
  
• Use Perplexity to research markets and solutions
  

If your brand doesn’t show up in those answers or worse, AI clearly doesn’t know who you are, you’re losing visibility to competitors who do.

Traditional SEO alone won’t fix that. You need to know how AI systems actually see your site.

That’s what SiteSignal’s AI Search Readiness + LLM Readiness Audit is designed to measure.

What Is an AI Search Readiness / LLM Readiness Audit?

Traditional SEO audits look at:

• Meta titles & descriptions
  
• Keywords
  
• Backlinks
  
• Basic technical issues
  

An AI Search Readiness / LLM Readiness Audit goes further. It evaluates how your site looks to:

• Search engines (Google, Bing)
  
• AI-driven experiences (AI Overviews, SGE-style results)
  
• Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity
  

SiteSignal runs automated weekly audits and gives each key area a 0–100 readiness score, so you can see:

• Where your site is strong
  
• Where AI will struggle to understand you
  
• What to fix first for maximum impact
  

Think of it as:
Google Search Console + AI Visibility Layer + Competitive Context.

The 6 Pillars of AI & LLM Readiness

SiteSignal’s framework scores your site across six pillars. Each one affects whether AI systems can access, understand, and recommend you.

1. Crawlability & Indexability

What it answers:

Can search engines and AI-powered systems reliably reach and read your pages?

Key checks include:

• robots.txt and meta robots rules
  
• XML sitemaps and internal linking
  
• Response codes (no endless 404s, 500s, redirect loops)
  
• Basic performance (pages not timing out or loading absurdly slow)
  

If bots can’t fetch your content easily and consistently, AI systems won’t have anything to work with no matter how “good” your content is.

2. Structured Data & Semantic Markup

What it answers:

Do machines understand what your site is about and who you are?

This covers:

• JSON-LD / schema.org markup (Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Article, FAQPage, etc.)
  
• Consistency between schema, visible content, and metadata
  
• Use of key fields like name, description, URL, sameAs, areaServed
  

Well-implemented schema does three things:

1. Makes your content easier to parse.
   
2. Helps AI tie your brand to clear entities (business, people, products).
   
3. Increases the chance of being selected in enriched and AI-generated answers.
   

3. Content Chunking & Hierarchy

What it answers:

Is your content structured in a way that AI can break into meaningful “chunks” and reuse?

Signals:

• Logical heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3 used properly)
  
• Sections that map to clear subtopics/questions
  
• Avoiding massive unstructured walls of text
  
• Clean HTML vs. chaotic nested div hell
  

LLMs work better when content is clearly segmented. If your pages are a mess structurally, it’s harder for any system to extract accurate, reusable fragments.

4. Answer Alignment

What it answers:

Does your content directly answer the kinds of questions users actually ask AI tools?

The audit looks at:

• Presence of natural-language questions and clear answers
  
• How well your content matches real user intent (informational, commercial, local)
  
• Whether key pages provide explicit, quotable explanations rather than vague marketing fluff
  

If your content reads like “We’re innovative, customer-centric, and best-in-class,” AI has nothing concrete to work with. If you answer specific questions plainly, you’re easier to cite.

5. Knowledge Graph & Entity Signals

What it answers:

Can AI systems reliably treat your brand as a known entity?

Signals include:

• Clear Organization / LocalBusiness schema
  
• Consistent name, URL, and branding across your site and external profiles
  
• Presence of “sameAs” links to major profiles (LinkedIn, GMB, Crunchbase, etc.)
  
• Clean, unambiguous brand naming (no constant rebrands or conflicting names)
  

This pillar affects whether you show up in AI-generated facts, summaries, and comparisons basically, the “who are they?” part of AI output.

6. Competitive Positioning

What it answers:

How do you compare to other sites AI could pick instead of you?

SiteSignal looks at:

• How your technical and LLM readiness scores stack against competitors
  
• Where competitors are structurally ahead (schema coverage, content clarity, etc.)
  
• Gaps where they’ve “trained” AI better than you have
  

You don’t operate in a vacuum. AI systems choose some brands more than others. This pillar shows how far behind or ahead you are.

How SiteSignal’s AI Search Readiness Audit Works

Here’s the workflow in practice:

1. Add your domain
   You connect your main website and define up to ~30 key page types (home, service, product, blog, location pages, etc.).
   
2. Weekly automated scans
   SiteSignal crawls your site, analyses structure, schema, and content patterns, and scores each of the six pillars 0–100.
   
3. Get scores, issues, and fixes
   You see:
   
   • Overall AI Search Readiness Score
     
   • Pillar scores (Crawlability, Schema, Chunking, Answer Alignment, Knowledge Graph, Competitive Positioning)
     
   • Concrete issue lists with recommended fixes
     
4. Fix → Re-run → Track improvement
   After implementing changes, you re-run the audit and watch scores move over time and correlate them with actual AI visibility via BrandRadar.
   

Example: Turning “We Offer Services” Into AI-Friendly Data

Before – vague and machine-unfriendly:

<h2>Our Services</h2>

<p>We provide professional cleaning services for homes and offices.</p>

To a user, this is fine.
To AI, it’s weak:

• No location
  
• No company identity
  
• No structured data
  
• No clear entity or service definition
  

After – specific, structured, and LLM-friendly:

<h2>Office & Home Cleaning Services in Los Angeles</h2>

<p>

ABC Cleaning Services provides professional commercial and residential cleaning

throughout Los Angeles County. We specialise in deep cleaning, move-out cleaning,

and regular maintenance for homes and offices.

</p>

<script type=”application/ld+json”>

{

  “@context”: “https://schema.org”,

  “@type”: “LocalBusiness”,

  “name”: “ABC Cleaning Services”,

  “description”: “Professional home and office cleaning in Los Angeles”,

  “areaServed”: {

    “@type”: “City”,

    “name”: “Los Angeles”

  },

  “serviceType”: [

    “Office Cleaning”,

    “Residential Cleaning”,

    “Deep Cleaning”,

    “Move-out Cleaning”

  ],

  “address”: {

    “@type”: “PostalAddress”,

    “streetAddress”: “123 Clean Street”,

    “addressLocality”: “Los Angeles”,

    “addressRegion”: “CA”,

    “postalCode”: “90001”,

    “addressCountry”: “US”

  },

  “telephone”: “+1-555-555-5555”,

  “url”: “https://abccleaning.com”

}

</script>

Now an AI system can understand:

• Who: ABC Cleaning Services
  
• What: Office & residential cleaning, with specific service types
  
• Where: Los Angeles, CA
  
• Context: Local business, service provider
  

This is the difference between “just another service page” and a page that can realistically be used in AI-driven local results and recommendations.

Quick Self-Check: Is Your Site Even Close to AI-Ready?

You don’t need to be technical to spot the basics. Run through this in 2 minutes:

Basic Foundations

• ☐ Your business name and location appear clearly on your site
  
• ☐ Your site loads in a reasonable time on mobile (not 8–10 seconds)
  
• ☐ Important pages are not blocked by robots.txt or noindex
  
• ☐ You have a working XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console
  

Structure & Content

• ☐ Pages use proper headings (one H1, logical H2/H3s)
  
• ☐ Key pages answer real questions your customers actually ask
  
• ☐ You have at least one FAQ-style section somewhere
  
• ☐ Service / product pages are specific, not generic fluff
  

Schema & Entities

• ☐ You have some form of schema / structured data (via plugin or custom)
  
• ☐ Your business name, address, and phone are consistent across site and profiles
  
• ☐ Your site links to major profiles (Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, etc.)
  

If you can’t honestly tick most of these, AI tools will either:

• Not find you
  
• Not understand you
  
• Or confuse you with someone else
  

That’s exactly what an AI Search Readiness / LLM Readiness Audit is for.

DIY vs. Automated: How Deep Do You Want to Go?

If you’re technical or have an SEO team, you can start manually:

• Use Google Search Console to check indexation and basic crawl issues
  
• Use Rich Results Test / schema validators to test structured data
  
• Ask ChatGPT/Gemini basic questions about your brand and see if they know you
  
• Manually review key pages for structure, clarity, and answer depth
  

The trade-off: manual checks are slow, easy to forget, and hard to repeat consistently.

SiteSignal automates the boring parts:

• Weekly scans
  
• Consistent scoring
  
• Clear priorities and remediation guidance
  
• And a direct link between technical fixes and AI visibility outcomes via BrandRadar
  

Final Thoughts: AI Search Won’t Wait for You

AI-driven search isn’t “coming” – it’s already how a lot of people discover tools, services, and brands.

You have two options:

1. Hope your existing SEO is enough for AI systems to figure you out
   
2. Measure and fix how you look to those systems before competitors lock in that visibility
   

SiteSignal’s AI Search Readiness Audit, powered by its LLM Readiness Framework, gives you a practical way to:

• See how “AI-readable” your site really is
  
• Understand where you’re losing visibility
  
• Fix the right issues in the right order
  
• Track improvements over time, not just guess
  

If you want AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity to actually recognise and recommend your brand, you need more than rankings.

You need your site to speak the language of LLMs and you need a way to prove you’re getting closer every week.