10 AI Search Readiness Checks You Can Do Before Buying an Audit

1. Read your contact page as a first-time visitor

Can you find the correct location, phone number, opening hours and booking route within a few seconds? If a practice has multiple offices, can visitors tell them apart? Record any contradiction before it becomes a technical problem.

2. Compare hours in more than one place

Check the visible contact page against major listing information and the hours in structured data if you can inspect them. Google documents openingHoursSpecification for local businesses. An error is worth fixing even if you never see it repeated by an AI assistant.

3. Visit the public robots.txt file

Try yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Are there site-wide Disallow rules? A rule blocking the entire production site warrants review. Robots instructions are only one part of access: firewalls, redirects and server responses can still interfere with retrieval.

4. Open a service page without using the menu

Copy the URL and load it in a private browsing tab. Does the important text appear? Does the page require a login or an unusual script interaction? A page that works only in a staff session is not a reliable public information source.

5. Try to answer a real appointment question

Look for practical questions people already call about: new-patient status, insurance participation, whether a treatment is offered, urgent-care policy or referrals. The answer should be explicit and verifiable rather than buried in a long marketing paragraph.

6. Inspect one clinician biography

Can you identify the professional's role, current affiliation, relevant credentials and how to book? Do service pages link to that profile? Avoid adding unsupported qualifications simply to make the bio look impressive.

7. Follow your internal links

Google says normal anchor links help crawlers discover pages. Choose a valuable educational article and see whether the main site has a path to it. Then follow links from that article to a service or booking page. Important pages shouldn't exist only in a sitemap.

8. Search the website for outdated facts

Look for former staff, previous office addresses, discontinued services and holiday-hour announcements that never expired. Structured-data templates and old landing pages can preserve incorrect information long after the homepage changes.

9. Run one careful AI spot check

Ask a specific, relevant local question in an available AI tool. Record the exact prompt, date and response. If the answer seems wrong, verify against public sources. A single result is not a stable ranking and should not be used to predict how all customers will search.

10. Write down what to fix and who owns it

An observation becomes useful when someone is responsible for confirming and correcting it. For each issue, note the URL, evidence, consequence, fix and owner. Assign business facts to operations, copy to the content team, and server or schema fixes to the developer.

If these ten checks uncover multiple contradictions, inaccessible pages or important missing answers, a deeper audit may be worthwhile. If they uncover only minor copy gaps, address those first. An honest checkup should help you make that distinction.