AI-Readability Audit for Your Website
A hands-on seven-point audit of whether AI systems and search crawlers can actually read your site, with evidence and fixes.
Why a site can be invisible to AI
A website can look perfect in your browser and be nearly empty to the machines that increasingly decide who gets found. Many crawlers and AI systems do not see your site the way a browser does. Some work primarily from the HTML your server sends, and many modern sites send very little meaningful content until JavaScript runs.
On many modern sites that raw response says, in effect, "run some code to find out what is here." Some machines run it. Many do not.
The cost is quiet. A readable competitor gets recommended instead of you, not because they are better, but because their site could be read.
The seven checks
VISIBLE-7 runs seven checks, ordered by how much damage failing each one causes.
- 01Rendering - are your actual sentences in the raw HTML, or only assembled by JavaScript.
- 02Titles and descriptions - does every page say what it is.
- 03Link previews - does a shared link show a branded card.
- 04Crawl permissions - does robots.txt allow the right crawlers, including a conscious decision on AI crawlers.
- 05Sitemap and canonicals - can machines find every page, once.
- 06Structured data - does the site introduce itself formally, with schema.
- 07The AI layer - llms.txt, and pages that state what you do in plain sentences rather than implying it through images.
What you receive
Seven areas, each marked pass or fail, with the evidence attached: the actual tag found or missing, the actual response the crawler got. A fix list in damage order, written in plain language for an owner rather than a developer. And findings beyond the seven where they exist, clearly separated.
If an area passes, the report says so and moves on. If everything passes, the report is short, and short is the correct result.
The full method is published as a playbook you can read before hiring anyone: Is Your Website Invisible to AI? The VISIBLE-7 Audit. The audit applies it to your site.
VISIBLE-7 · scored report
- Renderingpass
- Link previewspartial
- Structured datafail
How the audit works
There is one method and it is public. The free check samples it in minutes, and the published instruction file is yours to hand a developer or an AI agent. The audit is the third path: I run it myself and you read the report.
- 01Send me the URL - I run the audit against the seven VISIBLE-7 areas. Nothing is installed and nothing on the site is changed.
- 02I document the evidence - You get a scored report showing what passed, what did not, and the evidence behind each finding.
- 03You get the fixes - The issues are ordered by impact, with clear next steps for you, your developer or your AI agent.
What the audit can and can't tell you
The checklist is the instrument; the audit is the reading.
What it can tell you
Whether meaningful content is exposed, whether crawling and indexing instructions are coherent, and whether metadata, canonicals and structured data are configured properly.
And which failures actually matter. Two sites can fail the same three checks where one failure is cosmetic and one is the reason the site never gets cited. Weighing that comes from running this method against real sites every month and measuring what AI assistants recommend afterward.
What it cannot tell you
Whether an AI system will cite or recommend your site, or why a model chose one source over another. Passing every check does not guarantee visibility - technical readability is one input among several, and the content still has to be worth selecting.
Passing means the site stops losing on technical grounds, which is the entry ticket, not the race. If a check can only pass by faking something, the report says unfixable instead. A healthy site gets told it is healthy.
Questions
A check of whether AI answer engines and search crawlers can actually read and cite your website, followed by a prioritised list of what to fix.
Last updated: 15 July 2026
Want me to check your site?
Send me the URL. I'll tell you whether the full audit is the right next step.
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