The get-found checklist: nine things to check this week

You do not need a tool to find out. Nine checks, most under half an hour, will tell you whether AI assistants can reach your site, read it, and say anything useful about you. The first one takes ten minutes and most people have never done it: open the assistants and ask them the question your buyers ask.

We would rather you did this first. If you work through the list and everything is already in order, you have saved yourself a subscription. If half of it makes you wince, at least you will know why.

What should I check first?

1. Ask the engines about yourself (10 minutes). Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, then run the same query in Google and read the AI Overview at the top. Ask each the question a buyer would ask: "who are the best options for X in [your city]?" Note who gets named. This is the whole problem in ten minutes.
2. Check whether you are blocking AI crawlers (5 minutes). Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Look for entries naming things like OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User or PerplexityBot with "Disallow: /". If you find them and nobody made a deliberate decision to be invisible, that is your first fix.
3. Read your homepage as a stranger (5 minutes). Can someone tell what you do, who for, and where, from the first screen, without marketing language? If your homepage leads with "transforming outcomes", a model has nothing to work with.

How do I check that a model can actually read the page?

1. Find your one-sentence description (20 minutes). Write the sentence you want to be known by: category, specialism, customer type, location. Then check it appears, consistently, on your homepage, your about page, your LinkedIn, and any directory you are listed in.
2. Turn off JavaScript and reload (5 minutes). In your browser's developer settings, disable JavaScript and reload your homepage. If the page is blank or missing its text, some crawlers see the same thing. Worth knowing before you write another word.
3. List the ten questions your buyers actually ask (30 minutes). Not keywords: sentences. The things people say in first meetings and sales calls. Then check honestly whether a page on your site answers each one, plainly, in the first paragraph.

What are the checks people skip?

1. Look for the comparison gap (10 minutes). Do you have a page comparing your approach with the alternatives? Most brands don't, because it feels uncomfortable. It is also one of the most quotable page types there is.
2. Count where else you exist (15 minutes). Search your company name. How many places other than your own site describe what you do? If the answer is "almost none", your brand has a single source, and that makes you harder to recommend.
3. Swap one vague claim for a checkable fact (20 minutes). Find the strongest claim on your site and make it specific. "Trusted by leading organisations" becomes "used by 16 regional councils". Do this once and you will spot ten more.

What do I do with what I find?

Fix the crawler block first if you have one. It is the highest-leverage item on the list and usually a five-minute job.

Then legibility: the one-sentence description, the vague claims, the homepage that does not say what you do. Content comes last, because it is the most expensive and you want it pointed at the right targets.

This checklist is genuinely useful and completely free. Its limit is repetition: ask an assistant the same question twice and the wording can shift.

A one-off manual check is a snapshot with noise in it. Seeing a trend needs the same bank of questions, asked the same way, on a schedule, and kept. That is tedious by hand across four engines and a dozen questions, which is more or less why we built this.