Site Audit

AI visibility has a floor set by your own site. If GPTBot can’t fetch your homepage, if your content only exists after JavaScript runs, or if you have no pages that answer real questions, no prompt strategy will move the score. The Site Audit measures that floor.

It has two halves, run together and merged into one ranked fix list.

Half one Structural GEO checks Crawler access, indexability, meta tags, headings, structured data, and whether your content is readable without JavaScript.

Half two Lighthouse Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO from PageSpeed Insights. Their mean is the SEO Score in your Final Score.

Structural checks

Grouped by the question they answer.

Can engines reach it

Check	What passing looks like
robots.txt · AI crawler access	Present and not blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended
Meta robots · indexability	No noindex on the homepage
Sitemap	sitemap.xml found, via robots.txt or the default path
llms.txt	Optional — an emerging standard listing your AI-readable content
Readable without JavaScript	Substantial content present in the raw HTML

The JavaScript check is the one that surprises people most. GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot don’t execute JavaScript. A client-rendered single-page app can look completely empty to them while looking perfect in a browser. Server-side rendering or prerendering is the fix.

Can engines understand it

Check	What passing looks like
Page title	Present, roughly 30–60 characters, states brand and what you do
Meta description	Present, roughly 120–160 characters
Canonical URL	Self-referencing, unless pointing elsewhere is intentional
Open Graph & Twitter Card	og:title, og:description, og:image present — AI chat UIs use them for citation previews
Language & hreflang	lang declared; hreflang alternates for multi-language sites
H1 heading	Exactly one
Image alt text	80%+ coverage
Favicon	Declared — some chat interfaces show it beside citations of your site
Homepage structured data	Organization and WebSite JSON-LD, so engines can identify you as an entity
Blog & article schema	A content section exists, and posts carry Article/BlogPosting JSON-LD with headline, author and publish date

The content-section check deserves its own note. AI engines cite pages that answer questions. A site with no articles addressing what customers actually ask gives them almost nothing to cite you for — which shows up as a low mention rate no amount of technical tuning will fix.

Lighthouse

Run against your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights, usually 15–30 seconds:

Category	Measures	Affects
Performance	Load and interactivity — LCP, total blocking time, layout shift	Bounce rate, conversions, search ranking
Accessibility	Contrast, labels, keyboard navigation	Audience reach, WCAG/ADA compliance
Best Practices	HTTPS, console errors, safe dependencies, image sizing	Trust, security, maintainability
SEO	Crawlability, meta tags, mobile-friendliness	Organic traffic and discoverability

SEO Score = mean(Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO) This is the 20% term in your Final Score. Categories PageSpeed didn't return are left out of the mean rather than counted as zero.

Scores are banded as Good, Needs work or Poor on the panel, and each carries an AI-generated reading of what that specific score means for this site — not a generic definition of the metric.

Priority fixes

Structural failures and Lighthouse recommendations are merged into one list ranked by severity:

Severity	Typical member
Critical	AI crawlers blocked, homepage noindex, content invisible without JavaScript
High	No sitemap, no structured data, no content section
Medium	Missing meta description, multiple H1s, weak alt coverage
Low	Missing favicon, absent llms.txt

Structural checks can reach Critical; Lighthouse recommendations top out at High, since a slow page is a real problem but not a blocking one. Each item carries a What to do line, so the list works as a handover to whoever owns the site.

When the audit can’t run

If the homepage can’t be fetched, the affected checks are skipped and named rather than marked as failures:

Situation	What you’ll see
Behind bot protection	”requires a real browser” — the site returns a challenge to non-browser clients
Timed out	The request exceeded 20 seconds
HTTP error / DNS failure	The status code or connection error, verbatim

Bot protection is worth investigating rather than ignoring: whatever blocks the audit is likely blocking AI crawlers too, which is itself the finding.

If Lighthouse produces no data, the SEO term is dropped from the Final Score entirely rather than counted as zero — a missing measurement is not a failing grade. See Final Score.

Cadence

Structural checks change only when you change the site, so re-run after a deploy that touches rendering, routing, robots or templates. Lighthouse fluctuates run to run; treat a single-run swing as noise and the trend as signal.

Final Score → How this audit contributes 20% of the headline number. Content → Filling the content gap the audit surfaces.