What it means to be found by AI
AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI answers are starting to recommend local trades. This guide explains, in plain language, what the readiness tool checks, how to use it, and — honestly — what to expect. No jargon, no promises we cannot keep.
“AI Search Readiness” is a single idea: making your page easy for an AI assistant to read, understand and quote when someone asks it for a recommendation. The tool measures how ready your page is across three areas the industry calls AEO, GEO and LLMO. Below is what each one actually means for a trades business.
AEO, GEO and LLMO — in plain words
Three letters-soup terms, one simple goal: be the clear, trusted, quotable answer an assistant can hand to a customer.
Answer Engine Optimization
Leading with a clear, self-contained answer. If the first line of a section directly answers the question a customer asked, an assistant can lift it word-for-word. Burying the answer under a marketing intro means the assistant has nothing clean to quote.
Generative Engine Optimization
Being the trusted local source. Your name, address and phone shown as real text, the towns you serve, a visible “last updated” date, and links to your real profiles all tell an assistant you are a genuine, current business in a specific place — not a thin page.
Large Language Model Optimization
Being crawlable and quotable by the models themselves. That means allowing the AI crawlers (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and friends) and writing so each answer stands on its own when pulled out of context — text, not buttons or images.
Four steps, start to finish
Paste your page (or fetch it by URL)
Open the tool, paste the HTML of a page you want to improve, or type its web address and let the tool fetch it for you. Nothing is saved — the analysis runs right there in your browser.
Read the scorecard, pillar by pillar
You get a 0–100 readiness score and a breakdown across AEO, GEO and LLMO. Each check is a plain pass, warn or fail, with a one-line “why it matters” and an exact “how to fix”.
Fix the high-severity items first
Start at the top: the high-severity warnings and fails move the needle most. Most are quick — leading a section with a direct answer, turning a heading into a real question, or showing your address as text.
Copy the generated assets into your page
The tool builds ready-to-paste JSON-LD (FAQPage, LocalBusiness and more), an llms.txt body, a robots.txt block that allows the AI crawlers, and answer-first rewrite hints. Each only contains facts you typed in and confirmed are true. Copy, paste, publish.
One rule that runs through everything
What to expect — honestly
This is the part most tools skip. We won’t. Here is the plain truth about what readiness does and does not get you.
This tool measures readiness — nothing more
It scores how ready your page is to be found by AI. It is the foundation — not a ranking, not a citation, and not a guarantee. A perfect score means your page is well-built for assistants to read; it does not mean an assistant will recommend you.
You will not see an AI-traffic number — and that is on purpose
The tool will never show you an AI-traffic, citation, ranking-position or percentage-uplift figure, because no honest tool can. Attribution for AI referrals is broken: the large majority of visits that started in an AI assistant arrive at your site labelled as “Direct”. Any “AI traffic” number you see elsewhere is, at best, a guess. We would rather show you nothing than show you something invented.
On a new or low-traffic site, expect roughly nothing for 3–6 months
Getting picked up by AI assistants is slow, especially for a young site with little authority. Expect close to zero measurable AI traffic for the first three to six months. That is normal. Readiness is a long game — you are building the conditions to be found, then waiting for the assistants and your reputation to catch up.
The decisive levers are off your website
For a local trades business, the single biggest factor in whether an assistant mentions you is your Google Business Profile and your real customer reviews — the lion’s share of local AI mentions trace back to these, not to anything on your page. Page schema helps, but a complete, verified Google Business Profile and a steady stream of genuine reviews matter far more. The tool flags these as off-platform items so you don’t lose sight of them.
We don’t fabricate anything
Every asset the tool generates contains only what you typed in and confirmed is true. Specifically:
- The generators never auto-create star ratings, review counts or aggregate-rating markup. If you can’t see it on the page, it doesn’t go in the schema.
- They never invent statistics, jobs-completed counts, years of experience, Gas Safe / NICEIC numbers, response-time promises or prices. A field appears only if you type it.
- Dates and authors are taken only from what you provide — the tool never stamps “today” or makes up an author, so your freshness signals always match your visible content.
- Your FAQ schema is built strictly from the questions and answers on your own page — no invented Q&A.
- The off-platform checklist (Google Business Profile, directories, reviews) is scored only from what you tell us — it is never inferred as fact from your page.
In short: your structured data should be a faithful, machine-readable mirror of what a real visitor sees. That is what earns trust — and trust is what gets you recommended.
Ready to score your page?
Run a page through the tool, fix the high-severity items, and copy the generated assets into your site. Then keep your Google Business Profile and reviews fresh — that’s the long game that actually moves things.