Is Your Business Invisible to AI?
Your website can read beautifully to a person and be a locked door to an AI tool. Here are the three plain checks that decide whether AI tools can read your site, and the one job to do this week.
A lot of clients have been asking about this with the AI hype, so I thought you might want to check yourselves. The question, in their words: does AI actually see my site? Not always. And nobody writes to tell you. Your website can read beautifully to a person. The same page can be a locked door to an AI tool. One page, two very different experiences. Then you notice you are missing from the answers people get instead of search results, and you cannot see why.
What “AI-readable” actually means
Three things, none of them clever.
One: an llms.txt file. A small plain-text file that hands AI tools a map of what you are and where things live. A menu at the door instead of a tour of the kitchen.
Two: structure a machine can follow. Strip the design away and read the page top to bottom as text. Does it still make sense? Headings in order. Links that say where they go. If it turns to soup without the styling, a machine gets soup.
Three: a layout that holds still. Most pages jump about as they load. A person waits. A tool reading mid-shuffle grabs the wrong thing, or gives up.
None of this is new marketing. It is plumbing. And AI tools now read pages on people’s behalf, so the plumbing decides whether you exist in the answer.
Your one job this week
Run the three checks on your own site. Not a client’s, not a competitor’s. Yours. Then write down which of the three you failed: the file, the structure, or the wobbly layout. That one line is your to-do list for the week. Most sites fail at least one of the three. If yours does, you are in ordinary company.
The week in brief
- Google says its AI search sends billions of clicks a week: Head of Search Nick Fox said so on Friday 17 July. Plain Search still sends billions daily. Believe the figure or don’t. Google’s defence of AI search is “we send you traffic”. Only to pages those tools can read.
- ChatGPT is running two ads under one answer: two ads from two advertisers, the first time it has shown two ad units, spotted by Brodie Clark. AI answers are going commercial. The free door, getting cited, does not bill you monthly.
- Google quietly opened Lead Form ads to small budgets: the $50,000 spend requirement for Lead Form assets is gone from the documentation, with no announcement. What is left is roughly $1,000 in spend plus verification. Small advertisers were locked out of that format. Worth a look if your forms underperform.
- Google Ads now tells you what you are “missing”: its “missed growth opportunity” estimates moved out of Labs and into the main Recommendations tab as a beta, showing the clicks, conversions and revenue you supposedly lose to low budgets and bids. Useful data, but it is a spend-more nudge in a lab coat.