You don’t need to hire anyone to get a rough sense of how your website stands up to AI agents. Most of the important checks you can do yourself, in about an hour, with nothing more than a browser.
Here are ten. Work through them honestly and you’ll know whether you have a problem.
Check: Go to your pricing page. Try to select the prices with your cursor and copy them.
Why it matters: If your pricing lives in a designed graphic, it is invisible to every system that describes your business. You will be left out of comparisons, or worse, described with a figure someone scraped from a third-party listing years ago.
Pass: Prices are selectable text. Fail: You can’t highlight them.
Check: Try to select and copy your opening hours, your service list, your contact details, your FAQs.
Why it matters: Same principle, wider scope. Anything locked in an image or a PDF is effectively unpublished as far as a machine is concerned. PDFs are the common offender — particularly for membership bodies and professional firms, where the substantive content is often a downloadable document and the web page is just a link to it.
Pass: All key facts exist as text on a page. Fail: The real information is in a PDF or an image.
Check: In Chrome, open DevTools (F12) → Ctrl+Shift+P → type “Disable JavaScript” → reload the page.
Why it matters: Not every system that reads your site executes JavaScript. If your main content only appears after a render, a meaningful slice of them see an empty shell.
Pass: Your core content is still there. Fail: You get a loading spinner or a blank page.
Check: Click directly on the text label next to a form field — not the box itself. Does the cursor jump into the field?
Why it matters: That behaviour only works when the label is programmatically associated with the input. If it doesn’t work, an agent trying to complete your enquiry form has to guess which box is which — and placeholder text inside a box doesn’t count.
Pass: Clicking the label focuses the field, on every field. Fail: Nothing happens.
Check: Put your mouse down. Using only Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter and the arrow keys, try to complete your primary action — book, buy, enquire, sign up.
Why it matters: This is the closest thing to a free simulation of how an agent navigates. It follows a structural path through your page, and if that path is broken, or invisible, or traps focus in a modal, the agent fails in exactly the same place you did.
Pass: You complete it, and you can always see where you are. Fail: You get stuck, lost, or can’t tell what’s focused.
Check: Hard-refresh your homepage and watch. Does anything jump, shift or push down after the initial paint?
Why it matters: Layout shift breaks agents more severely than it annoys humans. The agent locates an element, then reaches for it, and it’s moved. Usual causes: images without declared dimensions, ads, cookie banners, and late-injected content.
Pass: The page settles immediately. Fail: Things move around for a second or two.
Check: Paste your homepage URL into Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator.
Why it matters: Schema is how you state facts about your business unambiguously rather than hoping they’re inferred correctly. Organisation, service, product, FAQ, opening hours, location. This is the single highest-value area for most sites and the most commonly half-done — a plugin adding three properties is not the same as proper markup.
Pass: Valid markup covering organisation and your main services. Fail: Nothing, errors, or organisation-only.
Check: Visit yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt. Look for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot.
Why it matters: There’s a legitimate strategic decision here — being quotable versus being scraped — and it’s yours to make. What you don’t want is to have made it by accident, via a plugin default or a line someone copied from a forum in 2023. Check that what’s there is what you meant.
Pass: You know what’s in there and you agree with it. Fail: You’ve never looked.
Check: Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity three questions: “What does [your company] do?”, “Who are the best [your service] providers in [your area]?”, “How much does [your service] cost with [your company]?”
Why it matters: This is the reality check. Everything above is about mechanism; this is outcome. Look for three things — are you mentioned at all, is what’s said accurate and current, and who’s being recommended instead of you.
Pass: You appear, and the description is right. Fail: You’re absent, or the details are wrong.
Check: Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage, or open DevTools → Lighthouse in Chrome 150 or later.
Why it matters: It’s the only one of these that’s a published, third-party number anyone can run against you. Note that it’s a fraction rather than a score out of 100 — Google is deliberately not ranking sites yet — and the WebMCP checks won’t report properly unless you’ve registered for the origin trial.
Pass: You know your number and what’s failing. Fail: You’ve never run it.
8–10 passes. You’re in good shape, and better shape than most. Worth a proper look at schema depth and, if your site handles bookings or transactions, at WebMCP.
5–7 passes. Typical. You have specific fixable problems rather than a structural one. Start with whichever of 4, 5 and 6 you failed — accessibility and stability are the foundation everything else sits on.
Under 5. Not unusual, and not a disaster, but AI systems are currently describing your business from third-party sources rather than from you. That’s worth addressing before it compounds.
Look back at what’s on this list. Readable text. Labelled forms. Keyboard navigation. Pages that don’t jump about. Accurate structured data.
None of it is new, and none of it is really about AI. It’s the same technical hygiene that makes a site accessible, fast and well-indexed. The agentic web hasn’t invented a new set of requirements so much as raised the cost of ignoring the old ones.
Which is the honest reason to be sceptical of anyone selling you an exotic AI-readiness product. The work that matters is mostly work you already knew you should do.
Want this done properly? Our Agent Readiness Audit covers all ten of these and a good deal more, with a ranked roadmap of what to fix first. £450 + VAT, deducted from implementation if you go on to work with us.