When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Mode to recommend "a good accountant near Taunton", the AI does not guess. It reads websites, weighs up what it finds, and picks who to mention. If your site is slow, vague or built in a way machines cannot parse, you are invisible in that answer, no matter how good you are at the actual work.

The fix is not mysterious. AI SEO is mostly about making your website easy to read, easy to trust and specific about the facts. Below is the checklist we run for our own SEO and GEO clients: 12 fixes, each with a plain-English explanation, a short how-to, and an honest difficulty rating: Easy (an afternoon, no developer), Moderate (some technical comfort helps) or Developer job.

First: can AI actually see your site?

Before anything clever, check the basics. Plenty of good-looking websites are effectively blank pages to a machine.

1. Serve your content server-rendered

What it is: many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. If your pages arrive as an empty shell that JavaScript fills in afterwards, those crawlers see nothing. How to fix it: view your page source and search for a sentence you can see on screen; if it is missing, ask your developer for server-side rendering or a static build. Difficulty: Developer job, though checking takes two minutes and costs nothing.

2. Keep your HTML clean and semantic

What it is: machines read structure, not design. One <h1> per page, headings in order, paragraphs in <p> tags, lists as actual lists, not a soup of styled boxes. How to fix it: audit your key pages and tidy the markup, or ask whoever built the site to. Well-built sites (including everything on our own CMS) do this by default. Difficulty: Moderate.

3. Respond fast

What it is: AI crawlers work to tight time budgets. A server that takes four seconds to respond often gets skipped entirely, not just marked down. How to fix it: decent hosting, caching switched on, images compressed. Test your homepage in PageSpeed Insights and look at the server response time first. Difficulty: Moderate.

Tell machines exactly who you are

Once AI can read your site, make sure there is nothing to misunderstand.

4. Add Organization, Article and FAQ schema

What it is: structured data (JSON-LD) is a machine-readable label describing your business, your articles and your FAQs in a format Google and AI assistants parse directly. How to fix it: add Organization or LocalBusiness schema site-wide, Article schema to blog posts, and FAQPage schema wherever you answer questions. Test with Google's Rich Results Test. Difficulty: Moderate.

5. Publish an llms.txt file

What it is: a plain-text file at yoursite.com/llms.txt that gives AI tools a clean summary of who you are and where your key pages live, a welcome mat for machines. How to fix it: write one page of honest facts and links, save it as llms.txt, upload it to your site root. We wrote a full guide: llms.txt explained. Difficulty: Easy.

6. Keep your sitemap honest

What it is: your XML sitemap is the map crawlers trust. If it lists dead pages, redirects or duplicates, you are wasting crawl budget and eroding trust. How to fix it: make sure it contains only live, canonical URLs with accurate last-modified dates, and resubmit it in Search Console. Difficulty: Easy if your CMS generates it; Moderate if it is hand-maintained.

Put the facts on the page

AI cannot cite what you have not written down. This section is where most small business websites quietly fail.

7. State real business facts, including prices

What it is: when an assistant is asked "how much does X cost?", it quotes businesses that publish numbers and skips the ones that say "contact us for a quote". How to fix it: put your prices, price ranges, areas served, opening hours and typical timescales in plain text on the relevant pages. Yes, your competitors will see your prices. They already know them. Difficulty: Easy. Technically, anyway.

8. Answer real questions in FAQ content

What it is: AI answers are question-shaped, so question-shaped content gets quoted. How to fix it: collect the questions customers actually ask you by email and phone, and answer each one in a couple of honest paragraphs on the most relevant page. Pair with FAQ schema from fix 4. Difficulty: Easy.

9. Use descriptive headings

What it is: machines use headings as a table of contents. "How much does a rewire cost in Somerset?" tells them exactly what follows; "Our approach" tells them nothing. How to fix it: rewrite vague headings so each one could stand alone as a summary of its section. Difficulty: Easy.

Prove you are a real business

AI assistants are cautious about recommending businesses they cannot verify. Give them no reason to hesitate.

10. Keep your NAP consistent

What it is: your name, address and phone number should be identical, character for character, on your website, Google Business Profile, and every directory that mentions you. Mismatches read as unreliability. How to fix it: pick one canonical format, then work through your site footer, contact page and major listings. Difficulty: Easy, but tedious.

11. Write proper alt text

What it is: alt text is the only version of your images a machine gets. "IMG_4021" says nothing; "Newly fitted grey shaker kitchen in a Bridgwater semi" says plenty. How to fix it: describe each meaningful image factually, in one sentence, as if to someone on the phone. Difficulty: Easy.

12. Show who wrote it

What it is: content with a named, findable human behind it carries more weight than anonymous copy, for Google and AI alike. How to fix it: add author names to articles, a proper about page with real people and credentials, and link the two together. We put both our names on everything for exactly this reason. Difficulty: Easy.

Where should you start?

Do not attempt all 12 in a weekend. A sensible order:

1. This week: the visibility checks (1 to 3). If AI cannot see your site, nothing else counts.
2. This month: schema, llms.txt and sitemap (4 to 6), plus real facts and prices on your key pages (7).
3. Ongoing: FAQ content, headings, NAP, alt text and authorship (8 to 12) as part of normal upkeep, the sort of thing a care plan quietly handles every month.

Common questions

Is AI SEO different from normal SEO?

Mostly, no. Around three quarters of this checklist is simply good technical SEO: clean HTML, fast pages, honest sitemaps, clear headings. The genuinely new jobs are llms.txt, thinking about how AI assistants quote you, and making sure your facts are stated in plain text rather than locked in images or JavaScript. If your normal SEO is solid, you are most of the way there.

Do I need to do all 12 fixes?

No, and you should not try to do them all in one go. Start with the fixes that check whether AI can see your site at all, because nothing else matters if the answer is no. Then add schema and real facts to your key pages. The trust signals can follow over the next month or two.

How do I know if AI tools can read my site?

The quickest test: right-click a key page, choose View Page Source, and search for a sentence you can see on screen. If it is missing from the source, the content is being built by JavaScript and many AI crawlers will not see it. You can also paste your URL into an AI assistant with browsing and ask it to summarise the page, then check what it got right and what it missed.

How long does AI SEO take to show results?

AI assistants that browse the live web can pick up changes within days, which is faster than traditional rankings tend to move. Answers that rely on trained models refresh more slowly, over months. Treat it like SEO: make the fixes, keep publishing genuinely useful answers, and check every month or so how assistants describe your business.

Want a site AI can actually read?

We are Bare Creative: Jack and Carly, a two-person web design and digital studio in Somerset. We build sites on our own CMS with all of this baked in from day one, and we stay around after launch to keep it that way. If you would like us to run this checklist against your site and tell you honestly where it stands, get in touch. No jargon, no hard sell.