Free Fix Guide 2 of 27

Make Your Website Readable by AI Assistants

When someone asks an AI for a business like yours, this is what decides whether you exist.

Signal this fixes
ai_retrieval_accurate
Time
20 minutes to diagnose, varies to fix
Cost
Free
Difficulty
Easy to check, may need your web developer to fix

What we measured

We asked AI systems to retrieve and describe your business, and compared their answers against your real details.

Why it matters

Here is the fact that surprises almost every business owner: no major AI crawler runs JavaScript.

Analysis of roughly a billion crawler requests found that GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot all download JavaScript files but never execute them. Google is the exception - it renders JavaScript, which is why you can rank fine in Google Search while being completely invisible to ChatGPT and Claude.

The consequence: if your phone number, address, hours, or service list only appear after JavaScript runs - the default for many modern website builders and for anything embedded in a chat or booking widget - AI assistants see a blank page where your business should be.

Fix it yourself

Run the 30-second invisibility test

1. Open your homepage in a browser.

2. Press Ctrl+U (Windows) or Cmd+Option+U (Mac). This shows the raw page, before any JavaScript runs.

3. Press Ctrl+F and search for your phone number.

4. Repeat for your street address, your city, and one service name.

If any of those are missing from the raw source, AI assistants cannot see them. That is the whole test, and it's the single most important thing on this page.

Step 1

Fix the rendering, if that's the problem

Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, Shopify, Webflow - these all render on the server by default. If your test failed on one of these, the missing text is probably inside a third-party widget or an image. Move it into real page text.

Custom React / Next.js / Vue site - tell your developer exactly this: "Enable server-side rendering or static generation

for all public marketing pages."

Regardless of platform - put your name, address, phone and hours in plain HTML text in the footer of every page.

Never as an image. Never only inside a widget.

Step 2

Check you aren't accidentally blocking AI3

This is more common than you'd think, and it's usually a security plugin or a Cloudflare setting nobody remembers turning on.

Visit https://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt in your browser. If you see Disallow: / under any of these names, you are invisible on purpose: GPTBot · OAI-SearchBot · ChatGPT-User · ClaudeBot · Claude-SearchBot · Claude-User · PerplexityBot

· Google-Extended

If you use Cloudflare, log in and check Security → Bots. The "Block AI Scrapers" toggle has been on by default for some new sites. Turn it off if you want to be found.

Publish a robots.txt that lets you be found

If your file is missing or wrong, create a plain text file at https://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt containing:

User-agent: *

Allow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot

Allow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User

Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot

Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-User

Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot

Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot

Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot

Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended

Allow: /

Sitemap: https://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

For a local business that wants customers, allow everything. Concerns about AI training data apply to publishers selling content - not to a plumber who wants to be recommended.

Step 4

Write pages the way an assistant reads them

AI systems extract facts best from clear, complete sentences.

Step 5

Common mistakes

A Disallow: / you never wrote. Security plugins and hosting providers add these silently.

Facts only inside a booking or chat widget. Those are usually iframes - invisible to crawlers.

An 'llms.txt' file. You may have read that this helps. Google has publicly stated it does not support llms.txt and will not crawl it, and no major AI provider documents support for it. It costs ten minutes and can't hurt, but do not prioritize it over anything on this page, and do not pay anyone to 'optimize' it.

This fix is free. You can earn and keep any Agenarys Seal tier - including Platinum - without paying Agenarys anything beyond the audit itself. If you would rather have help doing it, we sell that. We never sell passage.

Sources and further reading

Vercel - The rise of the AI crawler (crawler JavaScript analysis)

OpenAI crawler documentation: developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots

Anthropic crawler documentation: support.claude.com

Perplexity crawler documentation: docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots

Agenarys · Operational Intelligence Audit · Standard v2026.1 Issued July 2026 · agenarys.com/guides/ai-readability One <h1> per page that says what you do and where. Emergency Plumbing in Springfield, OH - not Welcome.

Write a real FAQ page in plain text. Question-and-answer pairs are extracted extremely reliably.

Answer in complete sentences. Write "Acme Plumbing serves Springfield, Dayton, and Xenia" - not just "Springfield, Dayton, Xenia." A fragment loses its subject when it's extracted.

Date your content. "Updated July 2026" stops assistants citing stale information.

Never lock facts in images or PDFs. An hours-of-operation graphic is invisible.

Your phone, address, and hours all appear in the raw page source.☐

Your robots.txt does not block AI crawlers.☐

Cloudflare bot-blocking is off, if you use Cloudflare.☐ Your homepage has one descriptive H1 naming your service and city.☐ You have a plain-text FAQ page.☐

Content reviewed July 28, 2026 | Next review: October 2026 (quarterly)