Most business owners don’t spend their lunch break admiring their own website. You probably built it, approved it, checked that the phone number was right and then got back to running the actual business.
Fair enough. The trouble is, your customers aren’t the only ones looking at it anymore. People are increasingly asking tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini things they once typed straight into Google:
Who’s a good electrician near me?
Find me a family lawyer on the Gold Coast.
Which local builder specialises in renovations?
Who can fix my pool before Christmas?
And AI has to come up with an answer somehow. That means your website now has another audience. One that doesn’t get impressed by the cinematic hero image you spent three meetings choosing. It wants information. Clear information.Preferably without having to rummage through six pages and a paragraph about your passion for delivering innovative solutions.
Your website may look perfectly fine but still be hard for AI to recommend
Any website can look modern, work beautifully and make complete sense to someone who already knows the business. That doesn’t necessarily mean an AI tool can confidently discover:
- Exactly what your business does
- Where your business is located
- Your target audience
- Why your business can be trusted
- How up-to-date the information is
- How potential customers can get in touch
Let’s compare two plumbers: one with a website that has an H1 header with “Quality plumbing solutions for homes and businesses.”
The second plumber’s website has ‘Licensed plumber servicing Southport, Labrador and the northern Gold Coast. We handle blocked drains, hot water systems, leaking taps and emergency plumbing”.
Guess which one gives an AI tool more to work with? Even if the second plumber has an uglier logo and a photo taken in 2017. It’ll always choose the one with the most recent, clear information.
People just like you are already using AI to search for businesses.
This isn’t a problem you can cast aside for five more years when we all have robot butlers and flying cars are the new way to travel. The future is happening now.
BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer research found that 45% of consumers had used AI tools to find local business recommendations, up sharply from the previous year.
ChatGPT was the most commonly used individual AI platform in that research. Google still matters enormously, but it is no longer the only doorway into your business. A customer might discover you through Google while another person might ask ChatGPT. You may even be discovered through social media networks or Google Reviews.
Start by saying what you actually do.
This sounds insultingly obvious. It is also one of the easiest things to get wrong. Businesses often become so familiar with their own terminology that their homepage starts speaking fluent Corporate.
You see phrases such as: Creating solutions that move businesses forward. It sounds polished, but it’s a bit wishy-washy. Solutions for what? Accounting? Pest control? Industrial refrigeration? Emotional support llamas? Your homepage should make the answer obvious within seconds. A visitor should be able to land on the page and understand what you do, who you help and where you operate.
- Take a look at some of the examples we’ve found while auditing websites.
Helping businesses reach their potential = too vague
An improvement would be: Gold Coast bookkeeping and payroll support for small businesses. - Beautiful spaces. Better living = too vague
An improvement on the homepage would be to include more specific information, like Kitchen and bathroom renovations across Brisbane’s southside. - Innovative solutions that maximise results = too vague.
This could be any business in the world.
Sydney CBD Beauty Bar for Flawless Skin
Don’t make people solve a riddle before they’re allowed to find out what you sell.
Give AI something better than your own glowing opinion of yourself
Every business website thinks it’s excellent. We know. You know. The internet definitely knows. Words such as trusted, leading, professional, quality and experienced appear on approximately every second business website created since civilisation discovered WordPress.
You can use all the fancy jargon, but how are you going to prove it? Here are some ways to show customers you are trusted, leading, and experienced without using those terms.
- Genuine customer reviews
- Video testimonials by real people
- Showcase your portfolio of projects
- before-and-after photos
- Real case studies
- Licences and accreditations
- The number of years you’ve been in business
- Profiles of your team
- specific results
- Awards that actually mean something
Instead of claiming you provide exceptional service, show it with facts like a 4.8 rating from 126 customer reviews. Don’t just pluck results from thin air; they need to be accurate. Instead of u”ur experienced team gets results, showcase your team’s profiles with photos, explain their experience, and the difference they’ve made for your business. For example: Holds the Sydney CBD record for selling houses before auction.
Showing proof does two jobs. It helps customers trust you, and it gives search and AI systems more concrete information about your business.
BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors research still identifies reviews as an important factor in AI search visibility, alongside website content, citations, links and Google Business Profile information. Turns out evidence remains annoyingly useful.
Check your Google Business Profile while you’re there
Your website isn’t operating on its own little island. AI search can pull information from business websites, directories, reviews, business profiles, and other trusted sources across the web. This means inconsistencies are important. If your website says you close at 5 pm, Google says 4.30 pm, and Facebook claims you’re still open Saturdays even though you stopped doing that during the Morrison government, there’s a problem.
Things to check across websites and social media for consistency:
- Consistent business name, such as spelling, abbreviations or consistent use of Pty or Pty Ltd matters
- phone number is correct and current
- address or service area is correct
- opening hours are accurate
- services are up to date
- website links are not broken
- business categories make sense
BrightLocal analysed 1.9 million citations used in local AI search in 2026 and found Google Business Profile was the single largest source, accounting for 28.5% of citations in its dataset.
Sort out the boring technical stuff
Nobody launches a business because they’ve always dreamed of discussing schema markup. Yet here we are. A handful of technical basics make your website easier for search engines, AI systems, and actual humans to use.
Check things such as:
- pages loading reasonably quickly
- the mobile version working properly
- headings being structured sensibly
- page titles describing the page
- important information appearing as real text rather than buried inside images
- broken links being fixed
- contact forms actually reaching somebody
- structured data or schema being used where appropriate
None of this is particularly glamorous.
Neither is checking the oil in your car, but ignoring it eventually creates a much more exciting problem.
Give each page of your website a job to do
Some websites seem terrified that a visitor might leave without being offered absolutely everything. So one page ends with five different calls to action, from download our guide to book online. There’s nothing more confusing for website visitors. Simplify the process by giving each page a job. Pick the main thing you want a person to do on that page and make it obvious.
- A service page might lead to Request a quote.
- A blog article might lead to Check your website score.
- A contact page should probably allow people to contact you. Revolutionary stuff.
- Clear calls to action help people move forward and make the page’s purpose easier for machines to understand too.
Watch for the quiet signs your website is getting stale
An outdated website doesn’t always look outdated. Sometimes it has lovely fonts and a photograph of somebody who hasn’t worked there since 2022. Here are several items to look for to ensure it’s as up-to-date as possible:
- reviewing the services you offer and removing any old ones.
- updating prices
- Taking down old team profiles, even if it looks like you only have a small team.
- outdated opening hours
- suburbs or locations you no longer service
- removing any enquiry forms that don’t work
- deleting links to old social media accounts
- removing pages with no call to action
- replacing old testimonials from 2019 with new ones
claims with no evidence behind them - several pages saying slightly different things about the same service
A good test of how well your website will perform is to pretend you know nothing about the business. Land on the homepage and give yourself 10 seconds.
- What does the company do?
- Where are they located?
- Why should I trust them?
- What do I do next?
If you can’t answer those quickly, neither can everybody else.
Check your score before you start randomly fixing things
This is the point where you could disappear into an SEO rabbit hole, open 27 browser tabs and emerge three hours later knowing far too much about canonical tags than necessary.
We’ve made checking your website simpler.
The XDesigns AI-Ready Website Score takes two minutes and checks the areas that matter most. You will answer a series of straightforward questions about your website and get your website score, including a breakdown of the main areas, the gaps worth paying attention to, and the top three things to fix first.
Don’t panic you won’t get a 40-page audit that’s written in marketing jargon, or an Excel sheet full of complex formulas, with no requirement to understand what an LLM crawler does. We provide a genuine and practical snapshot of where your website stands now.
How AI-Ready Is Your Website?
Find out how well your website is set up for
SEO, AI search visibility, and lead generation
and discover your top areas
for improvement.
Too Long Didn’t Read: Here’s the short version.
People are using AI to find businesses, but that doesn’t mean the basics of SEO have disappeared. A useful website still needs to convey.
- Accurate information.
- Proof of trust
- Be fast and mobile-responsive
- And it needs to make the next step obvious.
- The difference is that now those things help machines understand your business as well as humans.
Which, conveniently, means making your website more AI-ready usually makes it a better website anyway.
FAQs
Q: What does AI-ready actually mean for a small business website?
It means tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI search features can easily figure out what your business does, where you operate, who you help, and why you’re credible. There isn’t a magic AI switch hidden somewhere in WordPress. It’s mostly about giving these systems clear, accurate and trustworthy information.
Q: Do I need a new website?
Many websites just need a tidy-up, not a brand-new site. You might need clearer service descriptions, updated reviews, better location information, a faster page or a Google Business Profile that hasn’t been neglected since 2021. The score check helps you spot gaps before you spend money fixing things that weren’t broken.
Q: Is this just SEO with a new name?
SEO helps potential customers find your website through search results on a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. AI SEO is different. It needs to understand what your business does well enough to recommend your website when someone searches for it. The best part is, you don’t need two completely different strategies. Clear information, good reviews, and a website that clearly states what you do will help with both.
Q: Does ChatGPT recommend local businesses?
Consumers already use generative AI tools to find local businesses, and platforms increasingly recommend them directly in their answers. Not everyone has abandoned Google; far from it. ChatGPT provides another way to search.
Being AI-ready makes your business easier to choose
The funny thing about optimising a website for AI is that most of the improvements are things customers are always on the hunt for.
- Clearer services.
- Better proof.
- Accurate information.
- Fewer dead ends.
- A website that gets to the point.
Unless you need a brand new website, this won’t turn into another enormous digital project that needs thousands invested immediately. Start by finding out what needs attention straight away.
Take the free 2-minute AI-Ready Website Score , see where your website stands and fix the things that will make the biggest difference first.
And if your website has been quietly minding its own business for the past few years, this may also be a useful next read: Website Maintenance Packages Explained →
