Why we built a free website audit tool
Most business owners know something is wrong with their website. What they don't know is which thing, or which one to fix first. So they either do nothing for another year, or they pay someone to fix whatever that person happens to sell.
An audit is worth having because it changes that decision from a guess into a ranked list. You find out that your site loads in 6 seconds on mobile before you spend money on ads that send traffic to it. You find out that your headings are a mess before you commission more content that inherits the same problem.
We made it free and open because the report is genuinely useful on its own. Plenty of people run it, read it, and fix things themselves. That's a fine outcome.
What an AI search readiness check actually looks at
This is the part most audit tools still don't do, and it's increasingly the part that matters. A growing share of “who should I hire for this” questions now get asked to ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, or Claude — and answered without the person ever seeing a list of results. When that happens, ranking fourth is worth nothing. You're either in the answer or you aren't.
Those systems don't pick names at random. They pull from sources they can parse and have some reason to trust. The audit checks the signals that decide whether you qualify:
- Structured data. Whether a machine can tell what your business is, where it operates, and what it sells — without inferring it from prose.
- Crawler access. Whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, and PerplexityBot are allowed in. A surprising number of sites block these by accident and never find out.
- Answer-shaped content. Whether your pages answer real questions directly, or bury the answer three paragraphs down where nothing can lift it cleanly.
- llms.txt. An emerging convention for handing assistants a clean summary of your site instead of making them guess. Worth having, though nowhere near as important as the two items above — we've written the honest version rather than the sales pitch.
What this free check cannot tell you is whether assistants are actually naming you right now. That needs real prompts run against real assistants, with the answers read by a person, which is what an AI visibility audit does. This tool answers whether you are technically ready to be cited; the audit answers whether you are being cited.
If you want the longer explanation of how this differs from conventional search work, see AEO vs. SEO and our AI search readiness service.
The other seven categories
AI readiness gets the attention, but most sites lose more leads to unglamorous problems:
- Speed and Core Web Vitals. Measured live, not from a cached score. Most local searches happen on a phone on mobile data, and a slow site loses those visitors before they see anything.
- ADA accessibility. Website accessibility demand letters are at record volume and law firms find targets with automated scanners. The audit flags your exposure — and because accessibility and SEO are largely the same fix, this section usually pays for itself twice.
- Technical SEO. Meta tags, canonical handling, heading structure, and nine checks that generic speed tools skip entirely.
- Security. SSL, security headers, mixed content — the things that quietly cost you trust signals.
- Mobile experience. How the site actually behaves on a phone, not how it looks in a desktop browser resized.
- Revenue impact. An estimate of what the issues are costing monthly, so the list has an order.
- Plain-English analysis. A written breakdown of what to fix first, rather than a wall of red scores.
What to do with the results
Fix things in the order the report gives you, not the order that's easiest. The estimated-impact ranking exists precisely because the tempting items — a redesign, more content — are usually not the ones costing you the most.
If the list is longer than you want to handle, that's what we do: web design and development, SEO and digital advertising, and accessibility remediation, from one team in Jacksonville, Florida, working with clients nationwide. Either way you keep the report.