A checklist for business owners

What a machine reads from your website, in an afternoon

When someone asks Google, ChatGPT or another assistant who can help them, the answer is built from what those services can read. This checklist covers what you can check yourself with a browser, before you pay anyone for anything. Start with the free check: it reads your homepage, robots.txt and sitemap in about a minute and covers much of sections 1 and 2.

Free.No account.Nothing to install.About a minute.

1. Can it get in?

If a service cannot fetch a page, nothing else on this list matters for that page.

  • Your robots.txt does not turn away the services that answer questions. Open yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt and look for lines that block Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot.
  • You know which lines are about training. Blocking GPTBot or ClaudeBot refuses model training; it does not stop ChatGPT or Claude fetching a page to quote it. Google-Extended is the exception: it leaves Google Search alone but also takes the page out of what Gemini answers with. All fair choices. Make them on purpose, because a "block all bots" line copied years ago shuts out the answering services too. Which line does what.
  • Your host or firewall lets them through. Some hosting and security settings turn away automated visitors even when robots.txt allows them. Ask whoever runs your site whether bot protection is switched on, and what it blocks.
  • Your important pages are not hidden. No "noindex" tag on a service page, nothing important behind a login, and no page whose words only appear after a script has run. Check that last one.

2. Can it tell who you are?

An answer can only name you if it is sure which business you are.

  • One name, everywhere. The same business name on your website, your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Companies House and your social pages. Two names for one business leave a machine guessing whether they are the same.
  • Address and phone number written as text. Not only inside an image, a map or a PDF. A machine reads the words on the page.
  • Opening hours on the site, as text. "Open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm", in a sentence.
  • The same facts in structured data, if you can. Structured data is the part of a page written for machines: name, place and hours in a fixed form. Google says you do not need special markup for its AI features, but it helps search engines read those facts accurately, and it is usually a small job for a developer. See what yours declares.

3. Can it tell what you do?

A question gets an answer, and the answer has to come from somewhere on a page.

  • A page for each service you want to be found for. "Boiler servicing in Penrith" deserves its own page, not a line in a list.
  • Each page answers first. The opening lines say what you do, where, and for whom. Detail comes after. How to shape it.
  • The words are on the page, not in pictures. A price list photographed and uploaded is a blank to a machine. So is a menu.
  • Facts are current. An old price, a closed branch or a service you no longer offer can be repeated back to your customers as though it were true.

4. Does anyone else say so?

Assistants often quote other people's pages about you, not only your own.

  • Your Google Business Profile and Bing Places listings are claimed and complete. Category, hours, service area and a link to your site.
  • You appear in the directories your trade actually uses. The trade body, the local chamber, the industry register. A few relevant ones beat dozens of irrelevant ones.
  • Customers have written about you somewhere public. Reviews, a local news piece, a supplier's case study. You cannot write these yourself. You can ask.

5. Things that stopped working, or never did

You may still be sold these. Here is where each one stands.

  • FAQ markup for Google. Google stopped showing FAQ results in its search on 7 May 2026. Questions and answers on a page still help people; the markup no longer earns a Google result.
  • An llms.txt file. No provider documents reading one, and Google says you do not need one. Harmless, and not a way to be found. The longer answer.
  • Special "AI" rewrites of your pages. Google says its AI features need nothing beyond what ordinary search needs. Clear writing for people is the same thing.
  • Anyone promising you will be mentioned, or mentioned quickly. Assistants that search the web can only quote pages they have found, read and chosen to use, and none publishes a timetable for any of that. Assistants that answer from memory learn about you only when a new model is trained. Nobody outside those companies controls either, so nobody can promise it. What to ask anyone who does.

What this checklist cannot tell you. Whether anyone is asking about your kind of business at all, what an assistant actually says about you when they do, and whether a fix you made last month brought you a single customer. A checklist tells you what you have given a machine to read. It cannot see inside the answer.

Doing it yourself

Everything here can be done by you or your own developer. EdenLens does not sell the repairs. If the free check finds your site in good order, it says so, and you can stop worrying about the parts it covers. Every repair we report has its own page.

Checked on 3 November 2026 against Google Search Central's guide to AI features and the crawler pages OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity publish, and against the EdenLens method (v2.0). These pages change; when one does, this page changes with it, and the date above moves.