AI search is changing how people find answers. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude increasingly reply to a question directly, pulling from sites they can read and trust. Being ready for that is less about chasing keywords and more about whether a machine can understand your pages, work out who you are, and quote you with confidence. Here is a practical checklist you can work through.
Make your content easy to parse
AI models favour pages that are simple to read. Lead with a direct answer, then explain. Use clear headings that match real questions, keep paragraphs short, and put the useful part near the top rather than below a long preamble. AI Overviews and chat answers tend to lift a short, self-contained passage, so give them one worth lifting. If a person can skim your page and find the answer in seconds, a machine can too.
Add the right structured data
Structured data, or schema markup, is code that tells a machine what each page is without it having to guess. The types that earn their keep are Organization and LocalBusiness for who you are, Product and Offer for what you sell, FAQPage for common questions, Article for posts, and BreadcrumbList for structure. Mark up your key pages with the right types and AI can reuse your facts, prices and answers accurately. It is one of the highest-value technical jobs for AI search, and it sits alongside the wider work our SEO and marketing team does.
Let the AI crawlers in, and load fast
If a page is slow or blocked, it may never be read. On access, the AI tools use their own crawlers: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, Google-Extended for Google’s AI, PerplexityBot for Perplexity and ClaudeBot for Claude. Your robots.txt file decides which of them can read your site, so check you are not quietly blocking the very tools you want to appear in. On speed, Google’s Core Web Vitals are the yardstick, and Largest Contentful Paint, how quickly the main content shows up, is the one to fix first. Speed matters for shoppers as much as machines, as we covered in our piece on how page speed affects ecommerce conversion.
Consider an llms.txt file
A newer idea worth knowing about is llms.txt, a plain-text file you place in your site root that points AI models to your most important pages in a clean, easy-to-read form. It is not a settled standard yet and support varies, but it is quick to add and it is a tidy way to signal your key content to the tools that do read it.
Be clear about who you are
AI search leans on trust, and Google frames this as E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. Make it obvious who stands behind the site, with a proper about page, named authors with real credentials, and the same business name, address and phone number wherever you appear online. Mentions and links from other reputable sites back that up. The clearer and more consistent your identity, the more comfortable a model is naming your brand in an answer.
Answer the questions people actually ask
People ask AI tools full questions, not clipped keywords. Content built around real questions, each with a clear answer, is far more likely to be quoted, and it pairs well with FAQPage markup. This is the practical side of GEO, which we introduced in our post on getting to grips with GEO, and it is also your best defence against zero-click commerce, where the answer shows up and the click never comes.
A quick self-check
Run your site past these questions:
- Does each key page open with a clear, self-contained answer?
- Are your main pages marked up with the right schema types (Product, FAQPage, Organization)?
- Do your key pages pass Core Web Vitals on a phone?
- Does your robots.txt allow GPTBot, Google-Extended and the other AI crawlers?
- Is your identity consistent and easy to verify across the web?
Do not drop the fundamentals
AI readiness sits on top of solid SEO, it does not replace it. AI Overviews often draw from pages that already rank well, so sensible titles, tidy internal links, a mobile-friendly build and genuinely useful content still do most of the work. Get those right and the AI-specific steps have something good to point at.
Where to start
If you are not sure how ready your site is, that is worth a proper look. Our website design and SEO teams can audit your schema, crawler access, speed and content set-up, and get you ready for how people search now. Get in touch and we will take a look.
