I Audited My Own Website for AI Search. It Scored 53 Out of 100

Last week I ran a full SEO and AI search audit on smallbizpromptshop.com.au. My own site. The one where I teach small business owners how to be found by AI.

It scored 56 out of 100 for Google Health and 53 out of 100 for AI Search Health. Both land in the band marked "underperforming."

I am publishing the numbers because every article you will read about auditing your site for AI search is written by someone who has never shown you their own result. They give you a checklist. Nobody shows you the failure. So here is mine, including the parts that made me wince.

What does an AI search audit actually check?

Two different things, and most people only do the first one.

The Google half is the familiar work. Can search engines crawl your pages, are the right ones indexed, does each page have a title and a heading that say what it is about, is there structured data, is it fast on a phone.

The AI half is newer, and it asks a different question: if someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity or Google's AI Overview about your industry, is your site a source it could actually use? That depends on whether your content leads with the answer, whether it contains specifics a machine can lift, whether your business reads as a real and consistent entity, and whether AI crawlers are even allowed in. I have written a longer guide on how small businesses can rank in ChatGPT and AI search if you want the full mechanics.

A site can do fine on the first half and be invisible on the second.

What did the audit actually find?

206 of my 386 indexable pages were thin archive pages. Squarespace generates a page for every tag and every category. I had 161 tags across 115 blog posts. More tags than most small businesses have pages. Google was spending most of its crawl on pages that held one post and about 540 words of repeated navigation.

My homepage had no H1. No H2. No H3. Zero headings of any kind. The page that explains what my business does had no structural signal telling Google or an AI assistant what it was about. My shop page had no headings either. Neither did my contact page or my AI readiness quiz.

Twelve blog posts were sitting on auto-generated gibberish URLs. One of my better posts lived at /blog/59t320hy9my216kugdll5lgo7qoqxq.

A Squarespace demo slug was still live. A real article about ChatGPT trends was publishing at a URL that read "coming soon our newest face oil is meant to shine." It had been there since launch.

My FAQ page told customers to email a square bracket. The answer about a download not arriving said: "Email us at [insert contact email]." That is the page a paying customer lands on when their purchase has not turned up. You can see the rebuilt FAQ page now, with the questions actually marked up as questions.

My structured data pointed at a page no crawler can see. The social profile link in my schema was a Facebook Business Manager admin URL. Private. Useless as a trust signal. My only working social link was Instagram.

I had no analytics. No Google Analytics 4, no Tag Manager. A Pinterest tag, which tells me nothing about whether anyone reads my blog. Eighteen months of publishing with no measurement.

None of that is exotic. Most of it is what happens when a small business owner builds a site, gets busy serving clients, and never goes back to look underneath.

What scored well, and why it matters more than you think

One thing came out strong: 14 out of 15 for AI crawlability.

Squarespace has a setting that blocks AI crawlers. Mine was off, so GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended can all read the site. My content is server-rendered, so it is in the HTML rather than assembled by JavaScript. And I have an llms.txt file, a plain summary of the business written for AI assistants.

This is worth checking first, before anything else, because it is binary. If AI crawlers are blocked, nothing else you do matters. Open yoursite.com.au/robots.txt and look for GPTBot. If there is a line saying Disallow: / underneath it, you have opted out of AI search entirely, possibly without knowing.

What I fixed first, and why

I did not start with the most broken thing. I started with the thing that cost the least and moved the most.

One, the 206 thin pages. Ten minutes of code, and over half my indexable site stopped competing with itself.

Two, the missing H1S. The heading is the strongest on-page signal you have, and it is the first thing an AI assistant reads when deciding what a page is for. My homepage went from zero headings to one H1 and six H2S. The same logic applies further down the page, which is why the first 150 words of any page do so much work.

Three, the FAQ page. Nine questions that were marked up as paragraphs, not questions. An FAQ page with no question structure is the single most quotable page type on a site being wasted. That one also killed the square bracket.

Four, analytics. Not because it ranks anything, but because without it I cannot prove any of the other three worked.

The slug renames and the redirects came last. They matter, but they are an hour of tedium that moves less than ten minutes of headings.

The finding that actually changed my plan

Here is the part I did not expect.

While checking the competitive landscape, I found an Australian site in my exact space publishing 1,061 articles. I have 115.

I am not going to close that gap by writing more. Nobody in a small business is. If your competitive plan is volume and you are one person, you have already lost. Which is a different point from the one I usually make about not being as far behind on AI as you think, and both can be true at once.

What I can do is be more specific than them and better structured than them. Real prices instead of "affordable." Named Australian tools instead of "the right tool." A real person with twenty-five years of client work instead of an anonymous byline. And every page built so the answer comes first, the questions are marked as questions, and a machine can lift a clean answer without wading through three paragraphs of throat-clearing.

That is a winnable position. Out-publishing is not.

How to run this on your own site this week

You do not need a paid tool for most of it.

Open yoursite.com.au/robots.txt and check that AI crawlers are not blocked. Open yoursite.com.au/sitemap.xml and count the URLs. If the number is much higher than your real page count, you have archive bloat, as I did. On your homepage, right-click, view page source, and search for <h1>. If you find none, that is your first job. Check that your contact details appear identically everywhere, including in your structured data. Then ask ChatGPT a question a customer would ask about your industry and see whether you come up at all.

If you would rather find your starting point in three minutes than work through all of that, take the AI readiness quiz. If you would rather someone sat down and did it with you, that is what a Prompt Power Hour is for.

Then be honest about the result, the way I have been about mine. A score you are embarrassed by is more useful than a checklist you skim and file.

The gap between where your site is and where it needs to be is seldom a technology problem. It is that nobody has looked underneath for a while.