Is my website ready for AI assistants? How to test it in 5 minutes

More and more people ask an AI assistant "what is the best clinic in Porto?" instead of searching on Google. In five minutes, with no tools, you can test whether your business appears in those answers and whether the assistant can read your website. Nobody can guarantee you will appear, but you can remove what is stopping you.

The 5 minute test

Test 1: does my business appear?

Open two assistants (for example ChatGPT and Gemini) and ask, in words a customer would use:

• "What are the best [type of business] in [city]?"
• "Recommend me [service] near [area]."
• "How much does [service] cost in [city]?"

Answers vary from one time to the next. Repeat each question a few times and note how often your name appears. Do not draw conclusions from a single answer.

Test 2: can the assistant read my website?

Give the address of your website and ask for the answers a customer would want:

• What are the opening hours?
• How much does [main service] cost?
• How do I book?
• Which areas do you serve?

See whether it answers correctly, makes things up, or says it cannot open the page. Each failure points to a concrete problem.

Test 3: where does the information come from?

Ask for the sources. Often the assistant cites directories, the Google profile, comparison articles or third party sites, and not your website. That tells you where your business also needs to be well described.

What usually gets in the way

1. Information only in an image or a PDF. Opening hours, prices and services in an image are not read as text. Put them on the page, as text.
2. Content that only appears after the site loads scripts. Many automated tools only see the empty "shell" of those pages. Ask whoever built the site to confirm the main text is in the page code.
3. No frequently asked questions page. Write it with the questions as customers ask them ("how much does a teeth cleaning cost?") and direct answers, in plain text.
4. Different information in different places. Same address, opening hours and phone number on the website, the Google profile and social media.
5. No structured data. Code markers such as LocalBusiness and FAQPage help machines understand who you are, where you are and what you do.
6. Crawlers blocked by accident. Some hosting and protection services block AI crawlers by default. Check you are not blocking them by mistake.
7. Vague pages. One page per service, with a price or "from", the area served and frequently asked questions, is more citable than a generic page.

About the llms.txt file, a summary of the site designed for language models: it is not yet clear that the main assistants use it, but it takes little work and does no harm. Treat it as an extra, not as the solution.

And when the assistant talks to your business?

The next step is already happening. An assistant can enter a website, talk to the chat and try to make a booking on behalf of a customer. In the tests we run before launching an agent, we ask an AI assistant to do exactly that. If the website chat answers well, with correct and up to date information, the business is better prepared than most.

We ran the test on ourselves

When we tested our own brand, in August, we did not appear in any of 40 questions about voice agents and automation in Portuguese. That was the reason we started publishing more and fixing what we describe above.

How long it takes

The fundamentals, such as text instead of images, consistent information, frequently asked questions and structured data, can be done in an afternoon. The effect on assistants' answers can take weeks and is not guaranteed. Repeat the test once a month and track the progress.