What it is
In plain words, before anything else.
When you open a website, your browser downloads a page and then runs the code on it to draw what you see. Most AI assistants do not do the second part. They read what the server sends and stop there.
So a site built to assemble itself in the browser can look perfect to you and be an empty page to them. The other way this goes wrong is a small file called robots.txt, which tells automated readers where they may go. Plenty of sites block the AI crawlers in it without anyone realising, usually because a plugin added the lines.
What it costs you
The loss you never see happen.
Everything else on your site stops mattering. Your prices, your hours, your reviews and your services are all behind a door the reader never gets through.
You do not see this happen. There is no error and no bounced visit. The assistant simply answers the customer with a business it could read.
Check it yourself
Do not take our word for it. Look.
This takes about a minute, costs nothing, and needs no account with us or anybody else. A finding you have confirmed with your own eyes is the only kind worth acting on.
- 1
Open your site in a browser, right click on an empty part of the page and choose View Page Source. That is roughly what a machine sees.
- 2
Use your browser's find command on that source and search for something only your site would say: a service name, your phone number, your opening hours.
- 3
If you cannot find it there, a machine cannot either, even though it is plainly on the screen behind the window.
- 4
Then visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read it. Lines that say Disallow under a User-agent naming GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or similar are blocking those readers on purpose.
What we found
Out of 186 businesses we checked ourselves.
- 36 of 186
returned nothing a reader without a browser could use. Another six returned a page so thin there was almost no text in it.
Counted from our own checks of 186 real businesses, measured on 2026-09-10, one count per business. No business is named and none of their reports is public. The full write ups are in what we found.
How we fix it
What we do, and what we leave alone.
This one is usually your website builder's setting rather than ours, and we say so plainly in your report instead of selling you something.
Where the problem is robots.txt, it is a two line change and we tell you exactly which lines. Where the problem is a site that only renders in a browser, we publish the machine-readable layer alongside it so the content exists in a form a reader can use, without rebuilding your site.
Next
The checks closest to this one.
- L2
What is llms.txt, and does a small business need one?
One plain text page that answers, in order, what you are, what you sell and how somebody reaches you. - L3
Your hours and services, in a form a machine understands
A hidden block on the page that states your address, your hours and what you sell as facts, not as words on a picture. - L5
The map of your pages, and why anything can find them without it
A plain list of every page you have, published so a reader does not have to find them by wandering.
Is this one open on your site?
The free check runs all sixteen against your own address and tells you which came back clean, in the same plain words as this page.
Free. No signup. Takes about a minute.